Meghan McCain reveals she suffered a miscarriage
Meghan McCain is opening up about suffering a miscarriage, which she said happened just a few weeks ago. The television host shared details of the experience in a New York Times op-ed Friday.
McCain said the pregnancy came as a joyous "surprise" — the baby girl she was expecting would have been her and husband Ben Domenech's first child. However, she said she suffered a miscarriage the same day she shot a cover story for New York Times Magazine about her show, "The View."
"I look back at those pictures now, and I see a woman hiding her shock and sorrow," she wrote. "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."
"My miscarriage was a horrendous experience and I would not wish it upon anyone," she wrote.
The daughter of late Senator John McCain said she wishes she could have kept the miscarriage private, but that she wants to destigmatize the "distressingly common" experience. "We deserve the opportunity to speak openly of them, to share what they were and to mourn," she wrote.
McCain said she initially struggled with blaming herself for the loss.
"I blamed myself," she said. "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."
"I blamed my age, I blamed my personality," she continued. "I blamed everything and anything a person could think of, and what followed was a deep opening of shame. This, I told myself, is the reason my body is a rock-strewn wasteland in which no child may live."
She said she eventually realized the miscarriage was not her fault, and took comfort in thinking about her late father, who died last August.
"When my father passed, I took refuge in the hope that someday we would be united in the hereafter," she said. "I still imagine that moment, even as I trust that a loving God will see it happen. Now I imagine it a bit differently. There is my father — and he is holding his granddaughter in his hands."