'I froze my eggs in my 20s' - Serena Williams opens up

Serena Williams has shared details about how freezing her eggs in her 20s gave her peace of mind to concentrate on her career.

During a live taping of the “IMO” podcast with Michelle Obama, the tennis star said starting a family was not a priority at the time.

“I tell all my friends of age, freeze your eggs. Because I just feel like that is the best thing that you can do as a woman, as you decide to go on this journey,” Williams said.

“I froze my eggs. And I felt like once I did it, because I was still playing professional tennis, and I felt I wasn’t ready to stop, and I wanted to keep going, and it just wasn’t time,” the tennis legend said. “And then all of a sudden, all this pressure came off my shoulders. Like it was just, all this weight just fell off my shoulders once I did that.”

The tennis icon has since been telling “everyone to do it.”

“I was like 27, 28, so it was a really good time to do it. And also, someone told me to do it, so I always felt like it was really important for me to pay that forward,” she said.

Williams believes that opening up about her fertility journey could help women better appreciate the fact that they have options when it comes to motherhood and career.

“Even if you get married later, you can still use those eggs with your husband,” she said. “You just have so many more opportunities and options, and so, I don’t know, for me, I was really happy that I did it.”

Williams and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian had their first daughter, Olympia, in September 2017. The couple later married that year when Williams was 35. They welcomed their second daughter, Adira, in 2023.

The 23-time Grand Slam champion said she always creates time to be present with her children, adding that she wouldn’t want to leave them for longer than a day.

“I really try to be a present parent,” Williams said. “Sometimes that’s hard, especially with the lives that we live. It’s very hard to be present, but I try to be extremely present.”

“I’m never gone more than 24 hours, ever. I didn’t leave Olympia until she was 6 for 24 hours. That may have been a little extreme, but that’s who I am.”

“I wanna raise my children. I’m a person who’s raising my kids, and that’s teaching them how I want them to live and how I want them to be.”

In March 2023, Priyanka Chopra also shared how she felt “such a freedom” after freezing her eggs in her early 30s.

“I could continue on an ambitious warpath that I wanted to achieve,” she said. “I wanted to get to a certain place in my career. And I also hadn’t met the person I wanted to have children with, or I didn’t see that. That’s anxiety-inducing.”

Fertility rates in the United States are low largely because only a few American women are having babies in their 20s. Some are opting to freeze their eggs. While freezing embryos for in vitro fertilization (IVF) has been done for years, freezing unfertilized eggs was complex and was mostly done for patients with cancer and fertility issues.

About 13 years ago, egg freezing for non-medical reasons became widely accepted. Demand has risen since then. From 2020 to 2021, there was a 46% increase in egg freezing procedures in the United States, with 24,560 total cycles.

Click here to read article