“We are excited to announce that our baby boy, Alec Neel Vance, was born this morning. Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother,” the statement said.
The vice president and the second lady thanked the staff at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C., where Usha Vance delivered the child and is recovering.
The couple, who have been married since 2014, also have two older sons — Ewan, age 9, and Vivek, 6 — and daughter Mirabel, age 4.
This marks the first time in modern history that the nation’s second family had a child while in office.
The last known instance was 156 years ago when Schuyler Colfax Jr. — serving as vice president to Ulysses S. Grant — and his wife Ellen had their son, Schuyler Colfax III, in 1870.
In his new book “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” Vance wrote that he’d asked his wife to have another baby for years but Usha said she was done, due in part to the family’s elevation into the national spotlight.
However, he said her opinion changed after the death of Charlie Kirk. The Vances flew Kirk’s body home to Arizona days after he was shot and killed last fall, and his widow Erika Kirk expressed regret about not having had more children with her late husband.
“Something changed for Usha, and not long after we buried my friend, she became pregnant with our fourth child, a boy. One life was stolen from us, but another was given,” Vance wrote.
In an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” Usha Vance called Erika Kirk’s comments about her family “very powerful” and “certainly very moving to both of us.”
“I think I had already started to open my mind to the possibility,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that this was, for me in any way, the decisive factor. But it came in the middle of a conversation that we were already having.”
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