Usha Vance opens up about her pregnancy struggles while teasing whether she and JD are planning for another baby
Vance, 39, sat down with Meghan McCain for an episode of the former View host's 2Way YouTube show Citizen McCain. The interview aired Wednesday.
Usha and Vice President J.D. Vance have three children already - Ewan, 8, Vivek, 5, and Mirabel, 3 - with Vance telling McCain that she suffered from amenia while pregnant with all three.
But she revealed that the second couple is leaving the door open to a fourth.
'Never say never,' she told McCain.
Vance said that when she and the vice president were married, after both studying at Yale Law School, they always knew they were going to have kids.
'The number though, that was the question. I grew up with just two kids in the family and J.D. has a differently structured family but he primarily grew up with just his sister. I think what we decided at the outset is we'll have two and then we'll see how we feel about that,' she explained. 'And I thought maybe I would have two kids, and I would think I'm done, this is good.'
'But I just liked having the two kids so much that I think I ended up being the driver for three, which really surprised both of us,' Vance continued. 'And now we're at three and I'm feeling pretty good about this and sometimes he thinks he might like to have a fourth, but we'll see where that leads.'
No vice president in history has had a baby while serving in the role.
President Grover Cleveland - who like President Donald Trump was the only president to ever serve two non consecutive terms - had a baby in the White House, with wife Frances giving birth to the couple's daughter Esther.
During the sit-down, McCain, 40, the daughter of the late GOP presidential candidate and Sen. John McCain, revealed to Vance that she was pregnant with her third child - a boy - with husband Ben Domenech, a frequent face on Fox News Channel.
'Well congratulations, that's so exciting!' Vance said.
'What I've really enjoyed about three kids is that it's just enough for them to be kind of a pack, like the oldest will take care of the youngest one, the youngest is so motivated to be like the older two that she's basically self-sufficient, always has been,' the second lady continued. 'It's awesome.'
Vance said that zero to one kids was 'an enormous shock.'
'Zero feels one way and one feels like the entire world is turned upside down and you don't know what you're doing and what's up and what's down,' she said. 'One to two wasn't that bas and two to three was, shockingly, the easiest of all.'
'So you may be in for a surprise,' she reassured McCain.
Both millennial women were candid about their pregnancy struggles.
'So during pregnancy, during each of them, I was prone to anemia, which just makes you so tired, and you're already kind of tired and especially when we were having our third child,' Vance said.
'I was completely exhausted because I had a trial right before,' the accomplished lawyer added.
Vance said the struggles ended up being a good test run for parenting.
'But for me it was actually a little bit different because pregnancy was so exhausting that not being anemic was like, you know, high on life and that really helped,' Vance noted.
She said that the couple's oldest son Ewan was born seven weeks before she started a Supreme Court clerkship, the final clerkship of her legal career.
The clerkship was for Chief Justice John Roberts, who had been appointed by Republican President George W. Bush.
'And I mean, I kid you not, we were still mostly nocturnal and I wasn't awake during the day and I had to kind of switch to being awake and functioning during the day and sleeping at night,' Vance said. 'So that was a really rough transition for us.'
'It honestly ended up being good because it showed me a little bit about how much time I had been wasting before and how much more efficiently I could run my professional life in a way that would allow me to be the kind of parent I wanted to be,' she added.
'It was zero to 60 in a lot of ways but I think it changed everything about how I lived after that,' Vance said.
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