Personal Life
Clijsters was born on 8 June 1983, in Bilzen, Limburg, in the Flemish Region of Belgium. She is the daughter of Lei Clijsters, a former international footballer, and Els Vandecaetsbeek, a former national gymnastics champion. Lei Clijsters died of lung cancer on 4 January 2009. Clijsters says that she inherited footballer's legs from her father and a gymnast's flexibility from her mother. Kim's younger sister Elke finished 2002 as the ITF World Junior Doubles champion and retired in 2004 after back injuries.
In December 2003, Clijsters announced her engagement to Australian Lleyton Hewitt, but their relationship ended in October 2004. Clijsters is still affectionately nicknamed "Aussie Kim" by Australians. In October 2006, Clijsters announced her engagement to American basketball player Brian Lynch, who is based in Clijsters' hometown of Bree. In an interview with Sportweekend (a sports programme on Belgian Flemish television), Clijsters said that she was retiring to start a family. Clijsters and Lynch married privately on 13 July 2007, at 6 am at the Bree city hall. She was married by the mayor, with sister Elke, Lynch's brother Pat Lynch, and both sets of parents present.
Clijsters gave birth to daughter, Jada Elle, on 27 February 2008, at 1:35 pm at the Vesalius hospital in Tongeren, Belgium.
Read more about this topic: Kim Clijsters
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“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)