New Zealand's prime minister is pregnant. What will leading a country with a newborn look like?
New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has only been in office since October. And now, along with still getting used to her new position of power, she’ll have another job to learn from scratch: motherhood.
On Friday, Ardern, 37, announced that she is pregnant, expecting her first child in June, and that her husband, Clarke Gayford, planned to take a leave from his job as the host of a TV show about fishing to be a stay-at-home dad.
She made her announcement at a news conference, saying that she was “not the first woman to multitask,” nor the first “to work and have a baby,” but adding that she’d suffered from “pretty bad” morning sickness in her first trimester, and that she wasn’t sure “how the government cars would feel about having a baby seat in them.”
This is not the first time a woman leading a nation has given birth in office, though it is a very rare occurrence indeed — the most recent time being in 1990, when the late Benazir Bhutto, former prime minister of Pakistan, gave birth to her daughter Bakhtawar. Here, a look back at all the times a woman gave birth while leading a country.