Former ABC News Reporter Welcomes Baby After Devastating 2025

Former ABC News correspondent Zohreen Shah is officially a mother!

The journalist, who lost her family’s “dream home” to the Pacific Palisades Fire last year, announced on Monday that she and her husband, Rishi Shah, had welcomed their first child, a son named Reza Kashmir Shah, on Feb. 17.

“Meet the love of our lives, Reza Kashmir Shah,” Zohreen wrote on Instagram alongside photos of her first few weeks with her baby boy.

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Going on to explain the significance of her son’s name, Zohreen wrote, “Reza is a blend of our names, R for Rishi, ZA from my maiden initials. We’ve also long been inspired by Reza Aslan, who officiated our wedding.” As for Reza’s middle name, the proud mom explained, “Kashmir connects our past – the land my mom always called ‘heaven on earth’ between Rishi’s ancestral home of India and my birth home of Pakistan,” adding, “It’s also a nod to a pretty epic Led Zeppelin song- I extensively covered the band many years ago.”

Zohreen noted that while doctors had described her son as “perky,” “ravenous,” and with “a lot of hair,” she saw him a little differently. “I see him as ambitious (he came a bit early), fast (took 5 pushes in about 5 minutes) and efficient (doc cleared me to workout the next morning),” she wrote. “Yes… after researching surrogacy for 6 years, and dreading labor – Reza has now turned me into a pregnancy advertisement.”

“He was born on February 17, the first day of Ramzan for my community, Lunar New Year (born first few hours of year of the fire horse), and Fat Tuesday,” the first-time mom added. “I think he should get 4 bdays every year…although still trying to get Rishi on board with the idea :)”

Thanking her medical and fertility teams for helping her along her motherhood journey, Zohreen noted, “Reza came ready to celebrate life, and we are so in for every second of this adventure.”

Zohreen, whose Instagram bio notes that she previously worked as an ABC News correspondent and is now waiting to share a career announcement “soon,” announced on Jan. 30 that she was pregnant and expecting her firstborn son “in a few weeks.”

“Children often don’t see who their parents once were. I hope my kid will (and I hope I remember too!) So I put together this story of the years our baby spent as an embryo — frozen in time,” she wrote alongside a compilation of her news highlights throughout the years. “The world changed. I changed. I always knew I’d make this type of video for my child, but I never saw this story coming.”