Vice President JD Vance announced Sunday that his wife, Usha Vance, gave birth to a son named Alec Neel Vance at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
"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," Vance wrote on X.
The birth marks the first time in modern history that a sitting vice president's family has had a child while in office, according to CBS News. The last known instance was 156 years ago, when Schuyler Colfax Jr., serving as vice president under Ulysses S. Grant, and his wife Ellen had their son Schuyler Colfax III in 1870.
The Vances also have two older sons, Ewan, age 9, and Vivek, age 6, and a daughter, Mirabel, age 4. The couple met while studying at Yale Law School and married in 2014.
In his recent book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance wrote that he had asked his wife to have another child for years, but that Usha had said she was done, in part because of the family's rise into the national spotlight. He wrote that her perspective 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." She added: "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 couple announced the pregnancy in January, writing on social media, "Our family is growing!"
The vice president has been a leading voice in the Trump administration's efforts to encourage Americans to have more children. At the March for Life event in Washington last year, he said: "I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want -- and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them."
In June, Usha Vance sat down with ABC News for a wide-ranging interview. When asked whether she would like to see her husband become president one day, she said: "I am not a particularly politically ambitious person; I would like to see him happy. I would like to see him making contributions that matter and whatever form that takes is a form that I'll be supportive of."
She also described her biggest surprise in getting to know President Donald Trump, citing his humor and his interactions with children. "He has a really good sense of humor and has a sort of gentleness towards his children, towards other people's families and children," she said. "It shows a lot of caring about what they're going through and what is happening in their lives."
