Ayaan Hirsi Ali five months pregnant

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is five months pregnant with a child fathered by British historian Niall Ferguson, says British newspaper the Daily Mail.

The 41-year-old Dutch-Somali anti-Islam activist is reported to have told friends in the United States, where she is currently living.

Hirsi Ali has acknowledged a romantic connection with the British historian, whom she met in 2009 at a party given by Time Magazine for the 100 most influential people in the world.

Ferguson, 47, is married and has three children but does not live with his family. He teaches at Harvard University and the London School of Economics.

The former MP for the conservative VVD party has never made a secret of her wish to have children.

In My freedom, a book she published four years ago, she included a letter to her “unborn daughter”. In it, she writes of her struggle with the question whether she should marry her child’s father or not.

She says she regards having a child as an egoistic choice, motivated only by her wish to enrich her own life.

In the book she describes asking a doctor to freeze her egg cells, something he refused on the grounds that she was still in good health. cl