WELLINGTON: New Zealand Member of Parliament Julie Anne Genter made her own way to a hospital to have her baby, covering the kilometers from her suburban home to a maternity ward on a bicycle.
Julie Genter was already in labor, and she gave birth an hour later. “Big news!” the Greens politician posted on her Facebook page a few hours later. “At 3.04am this morning we welcomed the newest member of our family. I genuinely wasn’t planning to cycle in labor, but it did end up happening,” she wrote.
The Green party’s spokesperson for transport was not doing this for the first time – she was a minister three years ago when she took a similar trip. Ms Genter, 41, is a well-known and outspoken cycling advocate.
“My contractions weren’t that bad when we left at 2am to go to the hospital — though they were 2-3 min apart and picking up in intensity by the time we arrived 10 minutes later,” Genter wrote.
“Amazingly now we have a healthy, happy little one sleeping, as is her dad,” said Genter, a dual New Zealand-US citizen who was born in Minnesota and moved to the Pacific country in 2006.
The island nation of 5 million already has a reputation for down-to-earth politicians. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern famously took maternity leave while in office and brought her three-month-old to a United Nations meeting as she was still breastfeeding.
