Meghan McCain has revealed she suffered a miscarriage in early July.
The 34-year-old co-host of The View published an op-ed for the New York Times on Friday revealing that ‘a few weeks ago’, moments before a cover shoot for the Times’ Magazine, her doctor told her she was miscarrying.
‘I should have been proud,’ McCain wrote, of the shoot with her fellow hosts. ‘But inside, I am dying. Inside, my baby is dying.’
Looking back at the pictures from the shoot, McCain writes: ‘I see a woman hiding her shock and sorrow.’
McCain, whose father, revered veteran Republican politician John McCain died of a brain tumor 11 months ago, says she wanted to keep the news private, but is sharing her experience because her brief absence from screens after July 4th ‘was enough to spark gossip about why I would be away.’
What’s more, she says, she wants the millions of women who suffer miscarriages every year – up to 25 percent of known pregnancies – to know that they are not alone.
‘I am not hiding anymore. My miscarriage was a horrendous experience and I would not wish it upon anyone,’ she added.
This is the photo shoot for the cover of the New York Times Magazine during which Meghan McCain, 34, was suffering a miscarriage, McCain revealed on Friday
McCain’s father, revered veteran Republican politician John McCain, died of a brain tumor 11 months ago. Pictured: the two together in May 2014
Husband: McCain and Ben Domenech (pictured together two months ago) married in November 2017. McCain said they found out she was pregnant ‘many months ago now’
McCain married conservative writer Ben Domenech in November 2017 at her family’s ranch in Sedona, Arizona.
Since, she’s been batting off pregnancy rumors – with any absence from The View taken as a hint that she might be expecting.
In June 2018, she said she even felt pressured by her mom, Cindy, to have a child before her dad succumbed to his terminal cancer.
‘She has never asked me before and then all the sudden she brings it up all the time,’ McCain told People, two months before her father passed away in August 2018.
‘It’s hilarious and uncomfortable,’ she said, adding that she and Ben were ‘not quite there yet.’
According to McCain’s op-ed, the pregnancy was a joyful surprise ‘many months ago now.’
Hers came in the wake of a wave of celebrities speaking out about their experiences miscarrying – including Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Beyonce and Jay Z, and Michelle and Barack Obama.
But that didn’t make it easier on McCain, who said, ‘I have asked the same question every mother asks who loves and loses a child: Why?’
As most other women have described, she latched onto the usual scapegoat: ‘I blamed myself.’
‘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,’ McCain wrote.
‘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.’
Weeks on, McCain says, ‘I do not understand,’ but she is coming to terms with the fact that it was not her own doing.
‘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,’ McCain wrote.
She added: ‘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.’
McCain has been a co-host on The View since October 2017