Our hearts go out to Meghan McCain today.
In an op-ed in The New York Times on Friday, Meghan chose to reveal something intensely private and heartbreaking: she suffered a miscarriage.
Meghan got married to conservative writer Ben Domenech in 2017. Last year, Meghan opened up to People about the pressure to give her parents grandchildren, and how her mother suddenly began dropping hints.
She’s keeping the exact timing of all this private, but it does seem the pregnancy happened after the passing of Senator John McCain — and in fact was a bit of a shock for her. She recalls:
“The surprise of learning I was pregnant, many months ago now, swiftly turned to joy. With that joy came all the questions, plans and aspirations that every mother knows.”
Sadly, before she even got to the stage of revealing the happy news to the public, she lost the pregnancy.
Video: Meghan’s Infamous ‘Don’t Feel Bad For Me Bitch’ Was Just Weeks After…
She says she knew something was wrong but got the confirmation from her doctor “a few weeks ago” — just moments before she and her cohosts on The View took part in a photo shoot for a NY Times profile (that story was published on May 22).
Meghan remembers trying to keep her true feelings hidden from the cameras:
“I look back at those pictures now, and I see a woman hiding her shock and sorrow. I am posed for the camera, looking stern and strong, representing my fellow conservative women across the country. But inside, I am dying. Inside, my baby is dying. I knew I was pregnant before I formally knew I was pregnant. My body told me in all the ways women are familiar with. It told me in the same ways that I was miscarrying.”
Meghan calls it a “horrendous experience” and says she “would not wish it upon anyone.”
As many women do, Meghan says she unfairly blamed herself. She writes:
“Perhaps it was wrong of me to choose to be a professional woman, working in a high-pressure, high-visibility, high-stress field, still bearing the burden of the recent loss of my father and facing on top of that the arrows that come with public life.
This is not a complaint. This is reality. I blamed my age, I blamed my personality. I blamed everything and anything a person could think of, and what followed was a deep opening of shame.”
So awful. You are NOT to blame. Your choice to stay at your job is not to blame.
You know this as you’ve worked with multiple women who worked up until the very end of their pregnancies.
Speaking of which, Meghan did have to miss a few days of work, enough that she was afraid the absence would “spark gossip.”
She says was worried about revealing any of this to the public because the subject is so “taboo.”
But ultimately she shared her story in hopes it would help others who had gone through the experience. She says:
“I had a miscarriage. I loved my baby, and I always will. To the end of my days I will remember this child — and whatever children come will not obscure that. I have love for my child. I have love for all the women who, like me, were briefly in the sisterhood of motherhood, hoping, praying and nursing joy within us, until the day the joy was over.”
Meghan concludes with a sweet thought of her father, writing:
“When my father passed, I took refuge in the hope that someday we would be united in the hereafter. There is my father — and he is holding his granddaughter in his hands.”
What a healing thought that is.
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