Prince Harry and Meghan Markle probably thought their latest Instagram post would be taken as a lighthearted, humanizing glimpse into their life as parents.
Instead, it has galvanized critics, including a raft of conspiracists who falsely claim Meghan’s pregnancies were fake or staged.
In honor of their daughter Lilibet’s fourth birthday, Meghan shared a throwback video of herself, very pregnant, in June 2021, playfully twerking and dancing in a hospital maternity suite to the “Baby Mama” song. At moments, Harry slid comically into the frame doing hilarious robotic dancing.
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Meghan captioned the clip, which swiftly went viral, reminiscing about being overdue with Lilibet, and trying a long list of folk traditions (spicy food, walks, acupuncture, and ultimately dancing) to induce labor.
To most casual users who came across it on their feeds, it was just another clip.
Some found it funny, some thought it was a bit cringey, while others saw a cynical attempt by Meghan and Harry to rebrand themselves as fun, chilled out, good company and able to not take themselves too seriously. The anti-royals, if you will.
However, for one twisted corner of the internet, the video has become something else entirely: fresh “evidence” of the deranged conspiracy theory that Meghan’s pregnancies were fake.
Rather than shutting down those rumors, as the couple may have hoped it might, Meghan’s athletic twerking video seems to have poured gasoline on a long-simmering fire with the theory bursting back into life online this week.
One of the key online gathering points has been in response to a tweet by the Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner. Gardiner did not say the pregnancy was fake, but many commenters on his tweet have been vocal on the matter.
The conspiracy theory claiming that Meghan was never actually pregnant with either of her children has its roots in a spectacularly poor piece of media management when their eldest, son Archie was born.
At around 2 p.m. on May 6, 2019, officials announced that Meghan had gone into labor, only to reveal a few hours later that she had actually already delivered a healthy baby boy several hours earlier, at 5:36 a.m. that morning.
It subsequently emerged that this was a well-intentioned ploy to let the couple enjoy the birth privately for a while, to enable Meghan to get in and out of hospital without being observed and to allow Harry to enjoy time with his newborn son before announcing his birth.
The couple had been horrified by the media circus that surrounded the birth of Kate’s children, especially her first, and, understandably, didn’t want to endure the same thing.
It also emerged that Meghan had hoped for a home birth, but ultimately delivered the baby at the exclusive Portland Clinic in London. By Harry’s own account, Meghan and the baby were back home at Frogmore Cottage just two hours after the birth.
Unlike Prince William and Kate Middleton, who famously posed on the hospital steps with each newborn mere hours after delivery, Meghan and Harry waited a full two days to present Archie to a small press pool—and even then the baby was swaddled so tightly that only a sliver of his face was visible.
To skeptics and opportunists (peddling nonsense on social media can be a lucrative business), it looked like a cover-up, and the deviation from royal norms gave conspiracy theorists an opening to fill with their wild, ever-growing narratives.
The Sussexes, who loathe the U.K. media, also made a decision to release as little information as possible about their new son, creating an information vacuum, which conspiracy theorists raced to fill.
Then a bureaucratic detail turbocharged the fake narrative: about 11 days after Archie’s birth, Meghan’s name on the birth certificate was amended from “Rachel Meghan” to just “Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Sussex.”
This was done to align with royal conventions, but conspiracists, naturally, found nefarious implications, suggesting it was done to obscure the mother’s identity for some surrogacy arrangement. None of these facts prove anything suspect about Archie’s birth; but through the warped lens of the internet rumor mill, they have been reconfigured as pieces of a puzzle indicating a grand secret.
Meghan’s own estranged family also stoked the fire. Her half-sister, Samantha Markle, in particular, spun a tale that Meghan, who was nearing 37 when she had Archie, had frozen her eggs earlier and might have used one, with a surrogate, to carry the baby.
Even Meghan’s estranged half-brother Thomas Jr. got in on the act in 2024, releasing a bizarre online video where he donned a wig and fake bump to mock his sister, snidely claiming Meghan was “showing off the new bump she bought on eBay.”
Upon seeing Meghan shimmy in the delivery room, the trolls appear to have doubled down on their theories, with anti-Meghan echo chambers saying again this week that the bump was a fake “moonbump.”
This is a key term in the fevered imaginings of online trolls and self-styled sleuths, who have taken to combing through photos and videos of Meghan during her pregnancies, and then creating montages showing all the times they claim that her baby bump looked inconsistent or “too high” or appeared to change shape.
One of the defining features of successful conspiracy theorists, of course, is not just a total immunity to facts but the ability to reinterpret very clear evidence debunking a theory into further confirmation of their wildest accusations.
The facts of the matter are that Archie’s birth was officially registered in the U.K., listing Meghan as his mother. Lilibet’s birth certificate from Santa Barbara, California does the same. So, either, that’s what happened, or, the British monarchy, American authorities, dozens of doctors, nurses, and hospital staff in two countries have all conspired to keep the same secret.
That said, it’s perhaps slightly surprising that Harry and Meghan decided to publish the twerking video yesterday. They are well aware that no amount of proof will convince those who are hell-bent on believing in a vast royal surrogacy cover-up. They are also bitterly experienced in the toxic nature of the internet and it was inevitable the video would kick off the conspiracy theorists again.
The fake pregnancy conspiracy has been repeatedly debunked and has zero credible backing, yet it soldiers on, immune to reality. And paradoxically, every time Meghan and Harry try to crush it, through documentaries, interviews, or—now—Instagram posts, the conspiracy believers just burrow deeper into their fantasy.
So why subject themselves to the hate all over again?
Harry’s office said they did not want to comment.
