NZealand PM makes UN history with first baby

New Zealand’s prime minister has been proclaimed a history maker for taking “first baby” — daughter Neve - into the United Nations General Assembly hall, shaking up what is still a boys’ club of world leaders.

Photographs of Jacinda Ardern, 38, kissing and bouncing her three-month-old in the main hall at the Nelson Mandela Peace Summit on the eve of the General Assembly have gone around the world and taken the internet by storm.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric confirmed on Tuesday that it had been the first time in the organization’s 73-year history that a woman leader had taken her newborn into the assembly room.

“It’s altogether a good thing and we were delighted to have Neve in the General Assembly hall. With only five percent of world leaders women, we should do everything to make them feel as welcome as possible,” he added.

The sight of Neve and her father, who is her chief care giver, watching Ardern at work has attracted plenty of positive commentary in a United States, where many worry the Trump administration imperils women’s rights.

“I cannot stress how much the @UN — and the governments that comprise it — need this,” tweeted former US ambassador to the United Nations turned Harvard professor Samantha Power, herself a mother of two.

Ardern, currently the youngest woman leader in the world, is only the second female prime minister to give birth while serving in office, after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto in 1990. She says she wants to blaze a trail for other women.

Source: AFP