She also teaches in the Boston University College of Arts & Sciences in the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program.
[10] in Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues, she attempts to show there is a middle ground between liberal, civic republican, communitarian, and progressive camps.
[12] McClain and Fleming examine a line of Supreme Court abortion cases, an area communitarians identify with absolute rights, and note that the balancing of individual rights and state interests is taking place, not the application of strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, or the rational basis test.
[20] Critics of tolerance argue that it does not provide sufficient guidance and creates tacit approval of actions that have not been considered by society.
[25] Others argued that the examples chosen, primarily in family law and equality cases, lent themselves to autonomy as self-government argument.
[32] McClain rejects this idea, instead saying that many women choose to have an abortion because they believe it would be wrong to bring a child into their current social and economic situation.
"[46] Other legal scholars have expressed concerns about a public school sex education program that legitimizes various sexual activities when that conflicts with parental teachings.
McClain believes government has an obligation to expose children to teachings that vary from their parents' beliefs to encourage open-mindedness and critical thinking.
This contributes to sex equality by legitimizing family arrangements outside of the traditional male head of household and female caretaker model.
[53] McClain's book, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility, is "a feminist vision of the family in moral terms,"[34] : 837 and has been placed between critical feminist theories that seek to discontinue government regulation of marriage and those legal scholars, such as Margaret Brinig and Milton Regan, who favor continued state-governed marriage.
[34] : 822 The subtitle of The Place of Families, "Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility," outlines the values significant enough to require government action.
[58] Additionally, some of the institutions, such as the Institute for American Values, associated with empirical evidence showing greater benefits to children in families with low-conflict, two married biological parents, were also quick to turn out reports questioning the future of marriage in response to movement in the same-sex marriage debate.
[56] : 1060 McClain has also considered compensation for care work, arguing that raising children well instills traits that allow them to participate in democratic government.
[61] However, while women have traditionally been the primary caretakers, McClain believes government programming should encourage both genders to engage in this important work.
[62] However, McClain's recommendations are not simply compensating parents for the caretaking functions they perform; she has argued that caring for children should be considered a public function that is part of good self-government, and as such, society should do more to support parent education, work-life balance,[63] and employment issues in the child care industry.
[47] Others have questioned making child care a public value, worried that it would allow majority views to define family.