If there's one thing that will remind a woman she is, at her core, no different from the rest of humanity, it is childbirth. From the second that first 'is-it-real-or-is-it-a-phantom?' contraction set in until the exhilarating moment when her son was urged and cajoled and squeezed from her weary body, Kate Middleton would have understood implicitly that childbirth is life's great leveller.
It is the one thing that unites every mother in its inescapable embrace: we have sex, we conceive, with little effort (for most) we grow within us a cluster of cells that morphs and roils and shapes itself into a human being; like some unstoppable experiment, this invisible life-force extrudes from our core and imprints upon our bones so that our skin itches with the stretch and our backs ache with the pressure and our pelvises are so bruised and heavy we can no longer bear it.
And then, just as we feel we might erupt, nature commands us to expel this animated being from our body. Whether this squashed little stranger we have incubated is born naturally or surgically, whether it emerges black, white, rich or poor, the singular experience of childbirth condenses the mother to her most primeval: we are animals who have grown within us new life and then released that new life into the great big world.
But this is where the similarities end. For Kate, the experience would have been riven with anxieties that no other mother has had to endure: the international press camped outside her labour suite; the comments on Twitter from millions of voyeurs demanding to know why her baby was 'late'; all her days of motherhood, from the very moment her pregnancy was prematurely revealed, lived under a penetrating, fault-finding microscope.
But for all the intrusions this tiny prince and his parents will have to endure in the years that stretch ahead, there will exist, as a salve of sorts, the incalculable benefits that his social status has randomly afforded him. For it is indeed by accident, or circumstance, or both, that he has arrived in this world to the salute of guns and the intense attention of a world whose otherwise cold and suspicious heart has been reduced to goo by what it believes to be a fairytale. It is through historical precedent and fortune and chance and old-fashioned elitism that this baby will grow up in a rarefied world where his every smallest need will be swiftly met.
For the other British babies who share his birthday, there will be some small recognition in the form of a gift of a 'lucky' silver penny, worth GBP28 and issued by the Royal Mint to commemorate her birth. Silver pennies clutched in their fat baby-hands, his tiny countrymen will find that their own fortune — or lack thereof – is determined by the circumstances into which they have been born, the educational levels achieved by their parents, the religion and social conditions of their community, their allotted place in the world's rigid pecking order.
And further afield, new babies will find their own futures less secure still. As the prince struggled out into a gilt-edged world filled with applause and splendour, newborns in far-off places took their own first, desperate breaths of air, unnoticed by a wealth- and celebrity-fixated world, sweetly oblivious to the lives of deprivation and neglect that lie in wait. These babies were born into squalor and degradation, condemned from the moment of their conception to a life of hardship. Some will have already succumbed to dehydration or illness; others face a future that will never expand beyond the boundaries of a sweat shop or a rubbish dump or a brothel.
We shouldn't diminish the joy of the royal couple, nor mock the echelon into which their baby has been born. Privilege and disadvantage are, after all, largely products of fate, and this family has won a rare lottery that will ensure, if not contentment, then the consolation of limitless wealth and an assured sense of importance.
But we as an observant public should be wary of allowing our sustained and fawning attention to further entrench the idea that some people are inherently more valuable than others. We should remind ourselves that an altered history and geography might well have delivered this child into a charmless world.
Had he been born, for instance, in India — a Commonwealth country from which the British extracted great wealth, including the Koh-I-Noor diamond embedded in Queen Victoria's crown — his chances of dying in infancy would be ten times greater than in Britain, his lifetime earnings 90 per cent less; he would be 50 per cent more likely to contract HIV/AIDS, would have almost 13 years shaved off his life expectancy and would spend almost 97 per cent less money on health care.
It's this broader, ravaged world into which the new prince has been born that should contextualise for us his privilege and mediate our own response to it. There is no intrinsic honour in being wealthy or important; what matters more is that everyone — rich or poor — make good on the circumstances into which they have been born.
Catherine Marshall is a journalist and travel writer.
Baby feet image from Shutterstock