In January, HRH Princess Beatrice shared the joyful news that she and husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi had welcomed a baby girl, Athena, a baby sister for three-year-old Sienna. What the world did not know is that the family’s happy announcement followed weeks of intense worry, after Beatrice learned her daughter was likely to arrive prematurely. Here, she reflects on her pregnancy journey—and how she’s redoubling her efforts to spotlight the importance of research to improving female health outcomes—in a personal essay for Vogue.
Nothing quite prepares you for the moment when you realize your baby is going to arrive early. There’s so little control. Will she arrive healthy? Will there be complications? How will you juggle the rest of family life while trying to keep a tiny human safe and well?
You know that when your baby arrives the doctors and midwives are going to be there, doing everything they can to ensure she makes it through those challenging first few days. But you have no idea how these things will play out, what happens next. The uncertainty leaves you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown.
My second daughter, Athena Elizabeth Rose, was born on January 22. I learnt so much from this pregnancy journey—the latter stages of which I spent with all of these questions spinning through my mind. Following routine scans we became aware our precious cargo needed close monitoring, and understood we needed to prepare for an early arrival. What I learnt in this process has been humbling: understanding so much more about our remarkable human bodies, but also, more than anything, what we don’t know.
In many ways, for the longest time, women’s health has been left off the agenda. You can try and plan as much as possible with pregnancy, but sometimes your body—or your baby—has other ideas, which in some cases can lead to a premature birth. Thankfully, with ever evolving technology in the hands of knowledgeable doctors, midwives and nurses, more progress is being made every day towards understanding the unique complications that can accompany a premature pregnancy.
I’d describe myself as a technology optimist, and my career to date has been focused on how research and better data analytics can offer tools to those in search of a deeper understanding. With this experience in mind—and following on from my own pregnancy journey—I’ve found myself in the position of being a passionate new mother who wants to work to find answers for women globally. I want to do all I can to reassure those families whose babies might arrive early that they are not alone.
