Meghan McCain Calls For Mandatory Paid Maternity Leave In Return To ‘The View’

Meghan McCain returned to The View Monday morning following a three-month maternity leave and shared her challenges with the birth of her first child. McCain told viewers she suffered from post-natal pre-eclampsia, which delayed her return to the show, and urged her fellow conservatives to join with Democrats and advocate for mandatory paid family leave.

“When I gave birth, I actually had post-natal pre-eclampsia, and I was in the hospital for a week after on a magnesium drip. And it really, really kicked my butt,” she said.

“I was planning on coming back to the show for the election in six weeks after I gave birth, and I was physically unable to,” she shared. “I had to have my husband and my mother-in-law help me do everything from shower to eat. It was deeply humbling.”

McCain said she was thinking the entire time what a privilege it is to have this kind of maternity leave. “As I thought about it the more angry I got that there weren’t women in the rest of America that had the same kind of luxury that I had working here at The View,” she said.

Conservatives in particular, she added, “given that we are the party of family values and that everything about our ideology sort of stems from the nucleus of the family, that we are leaving women in this country without the capacity and ability unless you have an employer that allows you to take care of your child, to heal physically which is something that needs to happen.”

“We are the only developing nation that doesn’t supply women with paid family leave,” she continued, urging conservatives and Democrats to come together and make mandatory paid maternity leave a policy focus for 2021.

She said all women deserve “the capacity to have what I just had, which is three months of bonding time and breast feeding and healing from an emergency c-section, which is what I had to have.”

You can watch the entire clip above.