Woman's Day Publishes Kate Middleton Pregnancy Bump Photos: Australian Mag Defends Decision

The royal family's battle with the media intensified Wednesday when an Australian magazine said it would publish pictures of a pregnant Kate Middleton in a bikini.

Woman's Day magazine said it would follow the lead of the Italian Chi, which published the snaps of Middleton in a bikini on Tuesday, prompting outrage from St. James' Palace.

The Daily Telegraph said that the magazine was thought to have paid about $156,000 for the images. Unlike the topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge which caused a scandal last summer, these are relatively chaste.

Fiona Connolly, editor of Woman's Day, defended the decision in an interview with the Daily Telegraph of Sydney.

"It wasn't a hard decision to run these photos," she said. "She is on a public beach and she was mingling with holiday makers. There are other holiday makers in the photos. It's a very different situation to the nude photos, there is no photographer hiding in the bushes and she is not inside a private villa."

She added that the "gentleman's agreement" between the British press and the royals had no bearing on what she did.

The British media continued being ostentatiously outraged about the pictures, blurring them and blacking them out. A morning TV show got into trouble, though, when it accidentally forgot to do these things and showed the images for a couple of seconds.