Brooke Baldwin Tears Up Reading CNN Colleague’s Heartfelt Plea for People to Wear Masks

CNN’s Brooke Baldwin teared up on air Wednesday as she read the heartfelt words of a colleague pleading with people to wear masks.

Baldwin told viewers about Chelsea McGinnis — “one of my longtime writers on this CNN show team, a bright young woman who is near and dear to me” — who went into labor into March, months before she was expected to, and right around when the virus was spreading in her hometown.

As a result, Baldwin said, the twins are on a strict four-hour visitation schedule while in the neonatal intensive care unit.

She got emotional as she told viewers that in addition to not being able to take her twins home yet, the pandemic means right now “she can’t kiss her beautiful boys, she can’t introduce them to their grandmothers who so desperately want to help, she can’t hug her own mother even after her emergency C-section.”

And Baldwin shared this message from McGinnis making a heartfelt plea for people to wear masks:

“Next time you’re thinking about going out without a mask, next time you think this one time won’t matter or if I get it I’ll recover, please think of me, think of Chelsea, think of my twin boys, who were born premature at just 28 weeks. My husband and I have been through hell and back.

We almost lost both of them one horrible night in April. The nurses called the chaplain, and we already knew what it’s like now to plead with God to let you keep your child.

Please think of running into me in a hallway, in an elevator, in a grocery aisle. And if you’re not wearing a mask, if you’re not social distancing, you unknowingly give the virus to me, and hopefully I don’t get sick because I too am relatively young and healthy.

But then I go visit my babies in the NICU for the four precious hours the restricted visitation rules allow. Please think of me scrubbing my hands raw at the surgical sink. Please think of our NICU nurses — true angels on Earth — who sacrifice seeing their friends and family to protect my babies. Please think of these two tiny boys — look at them — who have no idea about the world they will so soon be a part of it and the thousands of families trying to protect immunocompromised children.

If simply wearing a mask protects them, is it really so much to ask?”

You can watch above, via CNN.