Harry and Meghan announce birth of baby girl

On Sunday morning, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced the birth of their daughter, Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor. She was born on Friday at 11:40 a.m. in Santa Barbara, California. They will call her Lili.

“She weighed 7 lbs 11 oz. Both mother and child are healthy and well, and settling in at home,” the couple’s spokesperson said in a statement.

“Lili is named after her great-grandmother, Her Majesty The Queen, whose family nickname is Lilibet. Her middle name, Diana, was chosen to honor her beloved late grandmother, The Princess of Wales.”

The new baby is now eighth in line for the British throne, behind her brother Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, her father, her grandfather Prince Charles, her uncle Prince William, and her cousins Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis.

On February 14, the couple announced that they were expecting their second child with a set of photos that showed them embracing under a tree on their Montecito property, nearly one year after their high-profile exit from the royal family.

It came less than three months after Meghan wrote an essay for the New York Times in which she discussed a July 2020 miscarriage, titled “The Losses We Share.”

A few days after the pregnancy announcement, Meghan and Harry sat for a headline-making interview with Oprah Winfrey where they announced that they were expecting a girl.

Harry said he felt “amazing” and “grateful” when he saw the ultrasound. “To have any child, any one or any two, would have been amazing,” he added. “But to have a boy and then a girl, what more can you ask for? Now we’ve got our family. We’ve got the four of us and our two dogs, and it’s great.”

When the couple’s first child, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, was born in May 2019, the couple announced the birth on the now-defunct Sussex Royal Instagram page.

The new family of three posed for pictures in front a select group of reporters near their Windsor home two days after his birth, and only shared the new baby’s name after that—a break in royal tradition that was an early signal of how Harry and Meghan planned to handle their lives differently.

With the new baby now among very few members of the House of Windsor to be born on American soil, it’s even clearer than it was for Archie that her life will take a different path than most recent royal babies.