WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) – Trailblazing US Senator Tammy Duckworth made history multiple times as warrior and politician, including being the first female amputee elected to Congress and is now set to become the first senator to give birth while in office.
Only nine other women in US history have given birth while serving in Congress. All of them were members of the House of Representatives.
“Well, it’s about damn time” in the Senate, Duckworth, a former US Army helicopter pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq, told the Chicago Tribune after announcing her pregnancy Tuesday.
“I can’t believe it took until 2018. It says something about the inequality of representation that exists in our country.”
For years, the 49-year-old lawmaker — the first member of Congress born in Thailand, and the first Asian-American woman to represent her state — has lived from one grave or momentous occasion to another.
One of those moments came last weekend, when Duckworth entered the Senate during an emergency debate on federal spending and reproached the commander-in-chief for charging that her Democratic Party was holding the military “hostage” during a government shutdown.
“I will not be lectured about what our military needs by a five-deferment draft dodger,” the decorated war veteran, standing on her titanium legs, boomed about President Donald Trump.
Cheating death
Duckworth’s life very nearly ended in Iraq on November 12, 2004, about 120 combat hours into her tour there, when the US Army Blackhawk helicopter she was co-piloting was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade.
As a fireball tore through the cockpit, Duckworth tried to help land the chopper, but was unable to use its foot pedals.
“What I didn’t realize was that my legs were no longer there,” she recalled to David Axelrod on his podcast in December 2016, just weeks after she was elected to a US Senate seat once held by Barack Obama.
Years earlier, Duckworth had prepared to be a US diplomat.
Having grown up in Southeast Asia — her father was a decorated US Marine who shuttled the family from Bangkok to Singapore to Jakarta — young Tammy learned to appreciate the influence of American aid.
“I saw a power in our country that was not military-based,” but ideals-based, she told Axelrod.
But Duckworth’s family went from delivering such aid in Asia to receiving it. Her father was laid off from relief work, and brought the family to Hawaii when the money ran out.
For years they survived on food stamps, with Duckworth taking odd jobs during high school and her mother, who had worked in factories in Thailand, doing sewing work from home.
When Duckworth went to college in Washington, she prepared for the foreign service exam but realized she felt more comfortable around classmates who were in the National Guard.
Duckworth joined the reserves on a whim. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, she begged her commanding officer to send her to the war theater, and she was deployed with her National Guard unit in 2004.
Nine months later, an RPG changed Duckworth’s life.
What followed, she said, was weeks of pain, but also anger that she could not return to exact vengeance on the insurgent who nearly killed her.
“I wanted to go back and get him,” she said.
‘Standing up’ for families
Instead, she slowly healed stateside, undergoing exhausting rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Maryland.
She learned how to walk on prosthetics, and endured what she called the “amputee petting zoo” when Bush administration officials filed through to pose for photographs with wounded warriors.
Her military experience has informed much of her work as a legislator. She has sought to help disabled veterans and ensure payment of troops during federal shutdowns.
She has been a vocal advocate for debating and passing a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that provides legal justification for military operations against terrorist threats such as the Islamic State jihadist group.
“If we can’t even tell the troops who risk their lives for us what we need them to do, what the hell are we doing in Congress?” she wrote last September in The Wall Street Journal.
In announcing she is pregnant with her second child, Duckworth triggered an outpouring of congratulations including from fellow veteran military pilot Senator John McCain, a Republican, who hailed her as “an American hero.”
Duckworth herself said she is “hardly alone or unique as a working parent, and my daughter Abigail has only made me more committed to doing my job and standing up for hardworking families everywhere.”