Meghan Markle's due date is coming up soon. There are approximately one hundred billion things parents have to do to prepare to welcome their first child, in our experience, but there's one pre-baby tradition you're unlikely to see: the Duchess of Sussex probably won't have a baby shower.
According to royal expert Victoria Arbiter, the royal family just doesn't do baby showers, period.
"A lavish baby shower would be seen as highly inappropriate" for a family with such vast wealth, she previously told The Sun. In most cases, baby showers are a way for new moms to get all the baby gear they need, but "there's nothing [the royals] can't go out and buy themselves."
That doesn't mean that baby showers aren't allowed, or that Meghan is being forced to follow a rigorous set of draconian royal baby laws. It's simply a matter of what's standard. We know Meghan has worn dark nail polish, also against royal protocol, although it's not a set-in-stone rule, either. And dark nail polish is only a few steps aways from violent rebellion, as anyone who has ever been a teenage girl knows.
And it's also less about restriction than custom: baby showers are a largely North American tradition that are still relatively uncommon in the U.K. Similarly, it's not that unusual that the royals choose not to reveal the baby's gender before the birth — that's another choice that's not usually made in Britain.
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And of course this news should be taken with a grain of salt: in the fall, a different royal expert told Harper's Bazaar the opposite.
"There is nothing stopping them from hosting a shower," Marlene Koenig said in October. "I would not be surprised if the Duchess of Sussex's American and Canadian friends might do something and throw her a shower, thus maintaining the North American tradition."
One other tradition Meghan is likely to follow, according to Arbiter: the Queen is typically the first person informed when the baby is born. She is the leader, after all.
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