‘We’ve wanted this so long.’ Candidate who shared fertility struggles is now pregnant
Nida Allam, who is running for Congress in North Carolina, publicly shared her struggles with fertility and losing a pregnancy last year. Now Allam is pregnant and nearing the end of her second trimester, less than a month from the primary election.
Now expecting a daughter later this year, Allam is again sharing her story.
Allam is one of several Democrats seeking their party’s nomination for the state’s 4th district seat in the U.S. House.
“It’s very exciting for us and our entire family because it was a lot of ups and downs to get here,” Allam told The News & Observer in an interview. She said her fertility journey included a year of trying to get pregnant, losing the pregnancy because it was ectopic and then having to go through an abortion last year.
“We’ve wanted this so long, both of us [she and husband Towqir Aziz] are children of immigrants, and who have sacrificed so much for us to be here,” Allam said. She said their parents have lived as proud Muslim-American families and they want to continue that legacy with their own growing family.
Allam said her fertility treatments included intrauterine insemination. Last year she had an ectopic pregnancy, which she said was described as “pregnancy of an unknown location” that meant there was no viable way for the baby to have survived.
“So my doctors, we had that difficult conversation with me and family members to have that abortion,” Allam said, which also saved her from a very high-risk health situation.
Allam, 28, is a Durham County commissioner and the first Muslim woman to be elected to office in North Carolina. She has gained national attention and endorsements, including from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
If she wins the primary and the general election in the safe Democratic blue district, she would be one of the youngest members of Congress along with being among those few lawmakers who are new parents.
In the late 1990s, about 20% of women in Congress were mothers of children younger than age 18, according to the U.S. House History, Art & Archives. The first woman to give birth while in Congress was Yvonne Burke of California, who was first elected to the House in 1973. In the Senate, Sen. Tammy Duckworth was the first woman senator to give birth while in office, in 2018. At the time, Duckworth told Marie Claire magazine that a woman giving birth while in office shouldn’t be news.
Allam said she told Duckworth about her current pregnancy and said there is a group of members of Congress who are all new parents. There should be more, Allam said, as well as more working mothers and women of color.
Allam said that after she went public with her pregnancy loss last year, she heard from several women who shared their own stories at events in Durham. She described the community response as “loving.” Several elected officials in Durham are parents, including of young children.
She plans to announce her pregnancy online with a video because she wanted to “share this excitement and joy with everyone, because I’m running [for Congress] because of my daughter.”
Democrats Allam, state Sen. Valerie Foushee and entertainer Clay Aiken are the three top fundraisers in the candidate field.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at https://campsite.bio/underthedome or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published April 21, 2022 at 9:00 AM.
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