Isabel Brown Is Having Another Baby, and She Wants More Gen Z Women To Do The Same

Isabel Brown is pregnant with baby number two, and this time, it's a boy. The 29-year-old conservative commentator and author exclusively revealed to Evie that she and her husband, Brock, are expecting a son, making their daughter, Isla, a big sister and their soon-to-be family of four one of the growing families Brown hopes will become a little less uncommon among her generation. Now a host at The Daily Wire , Brown has built one of the largest female Gen Z audiences in conservative media, with nearly 1.4 million followers on Instagram alone. And Brown is happy about how dramatically motherhood has changed her. "I found that to be so true through this first year and a half or so of motherhood with my daughter, and now getting ready to welcome my son into the world," Brown told me as we talked about how becoming a mother has transformed her understanding of identity and self-sacrifice. "Which is crazy to say out loud. It's the first time I've said that in an interview." The news comes at an interesting moment for Brown, who has spent much of her career speaking directly to a generation of women increasingly unsure whether marriage and children belong at all in the future they're building. Now pregnant again while continuing an ambitious public career, Brown is living out a rather different model of what a woman's twenties can look like. When I met her for Evie 's photo shoot along the waterfront, there was frankly little spectacle around any of it. Brown was warm and chatty, and she kept a close eye on the time, not for herself but to make sure Brock made it to the Oval Office in time. Brock eventually took off, and Brown, her daughter, a couple of her staffers, and I headed to Misha's Coffee to continue the conversation. Isla falls asleep along the way. Brown orders a hot latte despite the warm weather outside, and soon enough we're talking babies. Fittingly, it happened on Mother's Day Brown found out she was pregnant again in the middle of the night on Mother's Day. Isla, who had been sleeping well for the previous few months, suddenly woke up around 3:00 AM. Brown heard her crying and got up to check on her. But when she woke up, she noticed something out of the ordinary: she was drenched in sweat. "Part of me just knew," Brown said. "I took a pregnancy test and my husband was sleeping. It immediately turned positive, and I went and crawled in bed with my daughter, and laid looking at the ceiling for like three hours, thinking about how exciting this was." For three hours, Brown kept the news to herself, lying next to the little girl who had first made her a mother. Then, when Brock later came downstairs for his morning coffee, Brown approached him. "I said, 'Hey, I need to talk to you.' And he said, 'Are you having a baby?' And I said, 'Yep,'" Brown recalled. "It was so funny between the first experience and the second one, just knowing, right? You just know. You know your body pretty well. You're pretty in tune to your instincts, and it was such a wonderful blessing getting to find out on Mother's Day, especially." With her first pregnancy, it was Brown's own mother who seemed to know the news before she even did. Brown had only been married for two months when she traveled to Colorado for a speaking engagement, and since her parents lived nearby, she spent the night with them. As her mother helped her pack, she suddenly asked whether Brown was pregnant. "I said, 'No—why are you even asking me that? That's such a weird question,' but my mom just knew. She had this mom intuition that there was a baby," Brown said. "And so a few days later I went home and I took a pregnancy test and I found out we were having our daughter, which was an amazing, wonderful surprise." But this time around, Brown's own mom intuition kicked in. Brown and Brock were actually quite surprised by how quickly their first pregnancy happened, and as Brown explained it, her husband was apparently incapable of sitting on the secret too long. The two chose to FaceTime their best friends the same day, admitting they were having trouble wrapping their heads around becoming parents so quickly as they figured they'd have another year to think on their future. Yet one of their best friends, Mitchell, broke the tension, saying, as Brown remembers it, "Guys, I don't know what you're so nervous about. There's a word for getting pregnant two months after your wedding." When they asked what, he answered: "Catholic. You're fine." Pregnancy number two hits pretty different Brown was in her second trimester when we met in Alexandria, her growing bump tastefully on display as she, Brock, and Isla stood in the shade of the willow oaks along the waterfront. There has been, of course, one fairly significant difference between being pregnant for the first time and doing it again, Brown admitted: the second time, there's already a toddler running the show. Brown said this pregnancy has occupied considerably less of her mental space, at least until her changing body made it harder to forget. "They don't lie that you just have your mind in so many different places when you're pregnant with a toddler and the level of exhaustion," Brown said. While toddler days are a totally different experience from anything women can prepare for, Brown believes that having Isla by her side has made the experience all the sweeter. "I see my daughter play with her one and only baby doll, and she's starting to hug her baby doll, and getting to see her play with our best friend's son, in particular, this last couple weeks—we were on a vacation together—totally made my heart explode because she's gonna be such a great big sister," Brown gushed. Envisioning what her daughter will be like with her son, Brown first pointed out that Isla is "so caring" and "so sweet" and loves giving hugs or waving, but then immediately joked that as an oldest daughter herself, she expects her daughter will end up a bit bossy, too. "The nice politically correct way of us being bossy was that we had great leadership potential when we were kids," she said. Brown glanced at Isla with a smile, nostalgic for her own childhood as an older sister, and explained how special it is to her to know her own daughter will now share that experience, too. Brown grew up in a family of girls. Brock grew up in a family of boys. Their daughter was, naturally, somewhat of a new frontier for him, but now their son will be one for Brown. "It's exceptionally fun that we're having a boy because my husband had no sisters growing up. It was all boys, and this was his first experience, really, with a little girl. I come from a family of all girls," she said. "So now he gets to have the same experience watching me experience life with a little boy." When Brown was pregnant with Isla, she recalled that her prenatal vitamin made her feel sick. This time around, she researched what ingredients would suit her better, and switched to the brand We Heart Nutrition . She gave the brand extra kudos for donating some of its proceeds to pregnancy resource centers. Brown is staying super hydrated, too, pointing to Ballerina Farm's raspberry lemonade electrolytes as a must-have every day. While she admitted she hasn't really had pregnancy cravings (nor has she had much of an appetite at all, which originally made her suspicious she was carrying a girl, as an old wives' tale says of less-hungry pregnant women), she has been lenient about what she eats. Cold cuts, rare steak, and brie cheese aren't on her restriction list whatsoever, but Brown admitted that she hasn't been quite brave enough to try raw sushi. "I have yet to take the sushi-leap," she said, adding that she has at the very least treated herself to cooked rolls. "Life goes on." And while first-pregnancy Isabel was more inclined to wrap herself in proverbial bubble wrap, second-pregnancy Isabel recently found herself on a racetrack. "I did a ride-along in a Corvette around the Indy 500 or the Indy 250 Grand Prix track," Brown admitted with a laugh. "I had a harness and a helmet on. It was fine. We only went 100 miles an hour. That's not really that big of a deal." It was an answer she knows might absolutely horrify a certain kind of first-time expectant mom. "I do think you tend to put yourself in a lot of bubble wrap pregnancy one because everybody says, 'You can't do that. You're pregnant. You can't do that. You're pregnant,'" Brown said. But as she put it, "Life goes on." What it means to raise a good son Sure, motherhood has changed Brown. But she has watched it transform her husband, too. Since Brock grew up without sisters, Brown wondered what it would be like to watch him learn to father a little girl. And the answer has made her fall in love with him all over again. "To see how sweet and caring he is with our daughter is the most magical thing in the entire world," Brown said. "My husband has become a lot more patient, softer, kinder. And at the same time, a lot more hardened in his protection over our family." Naturally, baby number two has the couple thinking beyond pregnancy and infancy now, even beyond the toddler days, toward the kind of home and childhood they want to create for their children. The community they might want to raise them in, how they want to educate their children in a highly polarizing educational landscape—these are all conversations that may have been more abstract in the past, but now the couple discusses them in greater depth. And becoming parents has changed the marriage itself, too. "The biggest change, I guess, is that we just love each other a whole lot more all over again," Brown admitted with a grin. "They're not lying when they say the love that you feel for your spouse is infinitely more when you have children together because you see them in your babies. And that's so, so special to share." For Brown, finding out baby number two is a boy also introduced a whole new dimension of motherhood. She has made a name for herself speaking about the challenges facing girls and women, and she explained to Evie that conversations with friends like Riley Gaines have made her think deeply about what it means to raise a daughter. But a son presents her with a different responsibility. "Obviously, it's gonna take a whole different approach to raise a strong man in the culture that requires we have strong masculine, grounded Christian men again," Brown said. She's already buying books for him that cater more toward a developing male brain, and has begun thinking about how she will have to have tougher conversations about the role of men and masculinity. It will be "totally different" from how they prepare to launch Isla into the world, she explained. "I feel very blessed and very honored that God has chosen me to experience both of those things simultaneously," she continued. "And I think that's what I'm most giddy and excited for as we wait for him to come in the next couple of months." There's just one problem… he still needs a name. "My husband has vetoed every single boy name that I possibly can give him," Brown laughed. Naming Isla had been unusually easy. Brown offered up the girl name she adored, Brock agreed, and that was that. Their son, however, is proving much more difficult. "It honestly kind of feels like a puzzle: they already have a name… now we just have to figure out what it is. Kind of a fun game," Brown said. "You will know when we know what this baby's name is, which may be when he's born." Motherhood doesn't have to be an identity crisis For Brown, announcing another baby while her career continues to grow carries a certain weight beyond her own family. She has spent much of her adult life speaking to Gen Z, after all, a generation increasingly pushing marriage and parenthood later in life. Or questioning whether to pursue either at all. Brown believes many young women genuinely want children someday. The problem is that "someday" can remain in the abstract for years and years. "I do think it's just a baked-in automatic generational assumption that, like, 'Oh, yeah, someday. I'll have it all figured out, and I'll have it all. I'll get to do the career and the family thing. But I don't have to worry about that right now,'" she said. Brown never saw motherhood and professional ambition as inherently incompatible, however. Her own mother worked full-time as an attorney throughout her childhood. At one point, Brown watched as her mom even had to commute between Colorado and Idaho. This gave her an early model of a woman who was thoroughly involved at home without having to abandon her professional ambition. But Brown thinks the fears surrounding motherhood go deeper than career concerns. "I think all of it really centers around one core concept that seems like the worst possible thing that could happen to you as a young woman today. And that is the loss of your existing identity," Brown said. The ironic part, she argued, is that the fear contains a kernel of truth. "Your life will never be the same again, and you will never be the same person that you were before you have a baby," Brown said, matter-of-factly. "But it's such a beautiful transition." "You'll find yourself through losing yourself." She's planning another hospital birth at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, and it's not a random choice based on convenience or location. Brown went to Georgetown for graduate school, earning her master's in biomedical sciences policy and advocacy. When she arrived at labor and delivery, Brown recalled seeing a statue of Mary and Jesus, crucifixes in the rooms, and staff members praying for her, her husband, and baby Isla, soon to be out of the womb. "It was just absolutely beautiful," she recalled. And Brown even admitted that she really loved giving birth. She didn't casually downplay it by saying that it wasn't that bad; she went so far as to say her first birth was "peaceful" and "ethereal," a moment when she felt a direct connection to God unlike anything she'd experienced before. In her pre-med days, Brown thought of herself as a hyper-organized, Type-A woman. Motherhood, surprisingly, has made her less rigid, she admitted. She doesn't hold her daughter to a strict nap routine, doesn't use infant and toddler tracking programs, doesn't prepare additional food outside what the family already plans to eat, and they deliberately take Isla traveling and "out about the town." Perhaps that's why Isla stayed fast asleep for the greater part of our conversation, even as milk frothers screeched, baristas banged spent espresso out of portafilters, and Misha's clientele chattered loudly. So for Brown, motherhood has made that quintessential Gen Z pursuit of "finding yourself" look pretty different. "Your identity is gonna change in the different seasons of your life forever," she said. "The truth is, you'll find yourself through losing yourself and through bringing more love and more light into your life, through the connections that you make for other people far more than what you curate for your Instagram feed." The village, in real time Then, as if on cue, real life interrupted our conversation. We were sipping our coffee at Misha's, talking about overrated pregnancy products, when a woman we didn't know approached us. She needs baby wipes. Brown immediately starts digging through her belongings. "Hang on," she tells the woman, adding she's "99% positive" she can find some. She finds a pack of EveryLife wipes and hands it over. A family member of the woman later brought back what remains, but Brown appeared to have been prepared to surrender the whole thing. "I have been caught in airports where I have to ask for the wipes, so that's very real," she explained. Then we return to the interview. It's mundane, but also particularly fitting coming from a woman who, later in our conversation, says with conviction that one of her hopes for the next generation is "reviving the village again." Brown has very little interest in debating whether women like her qualify as "tradwives." In fact, she said she rejects the label for herself and thinks the online conversation surrounding the role of women and mothers often misses the point. "I am much more interested in cultivating a generation of women who are unafraid to fight for our children, to normalize having families, and falling in love with our husbands again in a culture telling us those are the two worst possible things you could do for yourself," Brown said. She also has no interest in replacing the girlboss with an equally impossible conservative version: an immaculately dressed woman raising six children with little to no effort, while running a company, maintaining a tidy home, and documenting it all online. "Real life looks nothing like the internet, ultimately," Brown said. And that applies to Brown, too. "Yes, you can 'have it all,' and it is more than possible for you to have a thriving career and a thriving family life, if that's something you feel called to," Brown started. "But chances are there's a lot more stressful nights and tears and missed airplanes and baby throwing up all over you and all the things that you don't think about because they don't make the Instagram feed, than you realize." "Real life looks nothing like the internet." Brown admitted that sleeplessness had been the hardest physical adjustment to motherhood. She joked that "slept like a baby" is, frankly, a terrible phrase because in her experience babies don't actually sleep well. Brown even estimated she basically didn't sleep properly for a year, recalling the nights breastfeeding Isla while Brock was "peacefully snoring" beside them. But to her, that's all the more proof of what women are capable of. After lamenting, to some degree, how she has learned to function on little sleep, she asserted that society sells women short by framing all of these sacrifices as something women shouldn't have to endure. Maybe they should endure it, Brown would say. "Maybe it actually would make you much more of a badass," she suggested. With baby number two on the way, Brown has no intention of disappearing professionally. She explained she's working on another book and has dreamed up ideas for documentaries, series, and other future projects bouncing around in her head. But motherhood has changed the weight she assigns to those professional milestones. A video that once would have seemed like a flop at 50,000 views now looks like 50,000 individual people she had the opportunity to reach, she admitted. And the family growing alongside that career increasingly seems to be the point of it all, rather than an obstacle in her way. A very full dinner table with love and laughter Before we finish, I ask Brown to picture her life five years from now. What does her dinner table look like? "Oh, that's a beautiful question," she responded, then paused. "I hope it is very full, with love and laughter, and I hope that we are in a position as a culture that's not an unusual sight." Brown explained that by then, she hopes young women surrounded by children won't seem like a political statement, a social media aesthetic, or even a throwback to another era. "I don't want my family to feel like a Norman Rockwell painting that feels like something from the 1970s and so out of touch for modern culture," she stated. "I hope five years from now, young women prioritizing family is so normal that it's not controversial on the internet at all." So for now, Brown is preparing to do it all over again. Another pregnancy, another birth at the hospital where she welcomed Isla, another newborn phase, another child to fit around a busy schedule of airplanes, studios, photo shoots, and sleepless nights. But best of all, the baby boy she's carrying now will be running around that "very full" dinner table alongside his big sister. And if Brown gets her wish, there won't be anything particularly countercultural about that at all.