Usha Vance gives birth to fourth child

Second lady Usha Vance gave birth Sunday to a baby boy, making the Vances the first second family in more than a century and a half to have a child while the vice president is in office.

Vice President JD Vance and his wife announced the birth of Alec Neel Vance in a statement posted on X.

“We are excited to announce that our baby boy, Alec Neel Vance, was born this morning,” the Vance family said. “Usha and the baby are happy and healthy, and our kids are overjoyed to meet their little brother.”

The couple thanked the staff at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where Usha Vance delivered the child and is recovering, CBS News reported.

The baby is the fourth child for the vice president and second lady, who have been married since 2014. They also have two older sons, Ewan, 9, and Vivek, 6, and a daughter, Mirabel, 4.

Usha Vance, 40, is the first woman since the 1870s to give birth while her husband is vice president, NBC News reported. CBS News reported that the last known instance of a child being born to a sitting second family was in 1870, when Schuyler Colfax Jr., who served as vice president under President Ulysses S. Grant, and his wife, Ellen, had their son, Schuyler Colfax III.

The Vances announced the pregnancy in January and said at the time that Usha Vance was due in late July. While promoting his new book this year, JD Vance said it was unlikely that he would take parental leave once the baby arrived, according to NBC News.

The vice president, who could run for president in 2028, has spoken publicly about the couple’s decision to have another child. At a White House event in Michigan in March, he said he had to persuade his wife.

“I remember when we decided to run for vice president, I said, ‘Honey, I really want to have a fourth kid.’ And she said, ‘Well, you can become vice president or you can have a fourth baby,’” Vance said. “But, ladies and gentlemen, I am persuasive, because I got both.”

In an NBC News interview later that month, Usha Vance confirmed that her husband had convinced her to have a fourth child, though she said she had “never closed the door on that.” She said that after having their daughter, she thought their family was complete.

“But as time passed,” she said, “I realized that I was feeling more and more, kind of, excited about that possibility” of having another child.

“And so if there was a chance, I should take it, and I knew that I’d be happy if we only had three kids, and I knew that I’d be happy if we had four. And so here we are.”

In his book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” Vance wrote that he had asked his wife for years to have another baby, but that she had said she was done, in part because of the family’s rise into the national spotlight, CBS News reported. He wrote that her view changed after the death of Charlie Kirk, whose widow, Erika Kirk, expressed regret about not having had more children with her late husband.

In an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” Usha Vance called Erika Kirk’s comments “very powerful” and “certainly very moving to both of us,” while adding: “I think I had already started to open my mind to the possibility. 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.”

The birth comes as the vice president and second lady are considering leasing a house in Middleburg, Virginia, separate from the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. The Secret Service is planning to provide additional security for the rural property, NBC News reported.