When Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha, announced last week that they were expecting their fourth child, a boy, later this year, they joined a rarefied club.
Ms. Vance is the first sitting second lady in recent U.S. history to announce a pregnancy while her husband is in office. The last time that happened was in 1870, when Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s wife, Ellen, gave birth to a boy. By venturing into this fairly rare territory, the vice president’s growing family has become a potent national symbol of conservative family values, one that casts the second lady as the ideal mother and wife, and yet one that looks vastly different from the average American family.
“Usha and the baby are doing well,” the Vances said in a joint statement posted on social media, “and we are all looking forward to welcoming him in late July.”
In a post congratulating the couple, the official White House social media account framed the announcement as a reflection of “the most pro-family administration in history.”
The pregnancy, in other words, is already being held up as an emblem of the pronatalist movement that, against a backdrop of declining fertility rates, has become a policy priority of the Trump administration.
Some on Instagram called the baby a “miracle” and a “blessing.” Responding to the Vance’s announcement on the platform, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, said, “Make families great again.”
Last year, Mr. Vance said in a speech at the annual March for Life that he wanted “more babies in the United States of America.” This year, he is “walking the walk,” said Malcolm Collins, a pronatalist activist who has worked with the White House on policy proposals to bolster the birth rate. That, he added, is an encouraging sign of the vice president’s commitment to the issue.
Always Part of the Plan?
The Vances were married in 2014, and both wanted children. It was the size of their family that was open to negotiation, Ms. Vance, 40, said last summer in a podcast interview with Meghan McCain. Ms. Vance, the eldest of two daughters of Indian immigrants, initially thought that she would want only two children and was more or less done growing her family after their third child. She was particularly enjoying being “past the baby phase,” she said.
Mr. Vance, though, had been pondering another child, she confided.
Is that possibility “still open?” Ms. McCain prodded.
“I mean, never say never,” Ms. Vance said.
The three Vance children — Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel — are now 8, 5 and 4 years old and are often seen accompanying their parents during official events and trips, including to India and the Vatican last year. Pictures of Mr. and Ms. Vance together, young children in tow, paint a glamorized family portrait that Americans have not seen at the pinnacle of the national government since 2009, when President Barack Obama’s family, with two young girls, ages 10 and 7, moved into the White House.
The Vances are older millennials amid a landscape of politicians who are generally nearing or well past retirement age. As a result, there hasn’t been a newborn anywhere near the White House since the Kennedy administration. The novelty of this situation alone might inspire the kind of fascination that surrounded “Camelot,” said Charles Denyer, author of several books, including “Our Nation’s No. 2: The Rising Influence of America’s Modern Vice Presidency.” (As first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was pregnant while in the White House and gave birth in 1963, but her son died two days later.)
“In today’s politically challenging world — and I’m putting it lightly — to see something real, something natural, like a mother holding a baby or a newborn cry?” Mr. Denyer said. “I think we’re going to be very interested to see that.”
The second lady’s evolution
The arrival of the new baby might require some changes to Number One Observatory Circle, the three-story Queen Anne-style official residence of the vice president, which was never designed to accommodate infants, Mr. Denyer said. It hasn’t had children living there since 1993, when Vice President Al Gore moved in with his, the youngest of whom was 10 at the time. Because the bottom floor of the house functions as the vice president’s office and a space for entertaining guests, Mr. Gore had a kitchen built upstairs in the residential area. There are also no elevators, only steep, narrow stairs, Mr. Denyer said, which might prove difficult for a very pregnant Ms. Vance and for an infant.
The Vances met at Yale University, where they were both studying law. After graduating, as Mr. Vance worked on writing “Hillbilly Elegy,” his best-selling memoir of the white working class. Ms. Vance pursued a legal career that included three prestigious federal clerkships. By the time her husband’s career veered into politics in 2022 — an evolution that she is said to have helped him chart — she had two toddlers and a newborn.
She quit her job at a California corporate law firm in 2024, when her husband was selected to be Donald J. Trump’s running mate. Last fall, some on social media speculated that the couple’s marriage was in trouble after Ms. Vance was seen in public without her wedding ring and Mr. Vance shared an intimate embrace with Erika Kirk, the wife of the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Mr. Vance addressed those rumors in an interview with NBC News, saying that their marriage was “as strong as it’s ever been” and that the couple got “a kick” out of the speculation. As for the missing wedding ring, a spokesperson for Ms. Vance told People Magazine that the second lady “does a lot of dishes, gives lots of baths and forgets her ring sometimes.”
“It’s been kind of cool to see how she’s developed and evolved in this new role,” Mr. Vance said on NBC News about his wife. In the past year, she has worked on settling her children into their new schools and maintaining as much normalcy as possible.
They “have to put away their laundry,” Ms. Vance told Ms. McCain, and “if they spill something, they have to clean it up.”
There’s now a swing set on the lawn of Number One Observatory Circle, and the carpets have been switched out for ones that are dog-proof and kid-proof so that “everything can be colored on,” Ms. Vance added.
It is still unclear how much time Ms. Vance will take away from official duties after giving birth in the summer. If her past is any indicator, it won’t be long: She started her clerkship with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. at the Supreme Court seven weeks after the birth of her first child in 2017, she told Ms. McCain.
“You know what would be the dream?” Simone Collins, who is a pronatalist activist alongside her husband, Malcolm, and a mother of five, said in an interview.
“It would be so cool if, after giving birth, Usha just wore her baby to events. Like, just had the baby in a carrier.”
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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