The Views Sara Haines Defends Her Take on Marriage & Children After Backlash

Sara Haines cleared up her thoughts on marriage and motherhood after receiving backlash for what she said during a recent segment on an episode of The View. The segment in question involved Haines and her cohosts discussing comments made by influencer Isabel Brown about having children.

At the March 26 Conservative Political Action Conference, Brown said it was “high time” to start “encouraging your children to grow up and have the courage to get married and have kids ‒ more kids than they can afford before they think they’re ready.”

Haines took issue with Brown’s statement and said onThe View, “My ultimate beef with this is that it wraps a woman’s worth up in her ovaries in a way that, for too long, has happened. The whole women’s movement was not about bucking the trend of staying at home or loving tradition. It was giving women a choice to do what they wanted.”

Brown later clapped back and Haines began receiving backlash from other conservatives who shared the influencer’s views. Haines recently appeared on theBehind the Table podcast to clear up her feelings about the situation.

“I actually kind of understood what she was trying to say [about how people should have babies when you’re not ready]. I don’t think you’re ever ready for it,” Haines began. “I think she was also saying a lot of people say, ‘I don’t know if I can afford it,’ so she was kind of making a catchy phrase. But my issue was with the greater message.”

Haines clarified that she loves babies and being married herself, but points out, “There is so much pressure in this world on women to define themselves by if they’re married and if they have babies. She’s young, so my take comes from a place of empathy and life lived. I’m older than her. Having been single, dating for years and not knowing if I was going to find my person, they make it sound like it’s this easy choice: get married, have kids. There are so many amazing women I know that aren’t meeting people. It’s really hard to. You could get into the reasons why that’s the case, but they’re open to finding people and they’re not.”

When it comes to having babies, Haines noted that “almost every person” she knows has “struggled” with having a child for various reasons, whether it’s fertility or having to fight for non-traditional surrogates, etc.

“We ask women all the time about marriage and kids and that seems to be all they’re worth,” Haines continued. “We’re living on a planet where we have 8 billion people. There were times where we needed people to procreate and make tons of babies, but we have plenty of babies [now].”

Haines insisted that every woman should be treated equal, whether they decide to get married and have babies or not. She also said she thinks Brown “misconstrued” what she and her cohosts onThe View were saying about the topic.

“Whether that was willful or ignorance, she’s missing my whole point, which is I know too many women who, for whatever reason, aren’t married and don’t have kids, and they matter,” Haines concluded. “They should be involved in government and policies, and not everything revolves around whether or not a woman has a partner or a child. …Sometimes it’s a full-blown choice and sometimes it’s just the way life turned out and I would never want to dim someone’s light in life by saying they matter less because of that.”

The View, Weekdays, 11a/10c, ABC