Don't know about his step-mother but I'm sure he did love Fabiola. Didn't she tried to convince him to get an annulment so that he could marry again and have a heir but Baudouin categorically refused? If that's not a sign ot true love...
Yes, this same biographer(Michelland) reports that Fabiola urged her husband to apply to the Vatican Rota for an annulment of their marriage after the premature birth of a baby girl, stillborn in 1966. Baudouin refused to even consider it, even though I don't think the Holy See would have denied him an annulment if he had really wanted one.
The entire situation for them was one of profound sadness. Paul Belien, author of "A Throne for Brussels", writes that each of Fabiola's pregnancies was a "
personal Calvary" for her because word would always spread that she was expecting again and each time tons of gifts and congratulatory telegrams would arrive at Laeken from all over Belgium and Europe...then she would lose the baby.
The uterine malformation was not discovered until Fabiola went secretly to Switzerland for painful and risky fertility treatments in late 1967. These treatments helped her conceive her final pregnancy, which she of course miscarried. Before the Swiss gynecologists made the definitive, doomed assessment of her condition in 1968, she had no idea about why she couldn't have a baby so I disagree 100% that she was being selfish. She was desperate to fulfill her duty and became a bit obsessed imo...imposing harsh penances on herself and visiting places purported to have miraculous fertility effects...shades of Russia's last Empress Alexandra Feodorovna.(Paul Belien,
A Throne for Brussels/Guy Michelland,
La Reine Blanche)
Thank God poor Fabiola had no
RASPUTIN whispering in her ear at Laeken Palace!
Periodicals and tabloids like Jours de France, Paris Match, and Point de Vue were constantly speculating that the marriage was over..that Fabiola would retire to a Spanish convent and that Baudouin would take a new wife.
Instead the couple drew even closer and more devoted to one another.
ETA: The Royal couple did briefly consider adoption in the late 1960's after Fabiola's final miscarriage in Feb 1968. The understanding was that the child would not have been in the line of Succession, and that the then eight year old Philippe Duc de Brabant was still going to be the "official" heir.
For reasons I am not sure of, they were discouraged from adoption by certain of the king's advisors.