Serena Williams, 44, says she made the right call to freeze her eggs in her 20s.
Speaking to Michelle Obama during a live taping of the “IMO” podcast, which was released on Wednesday, the tennis star spoke about her fertility journey.
“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.
The athlete said doing that allowed her to continue focusing on her career, without being pressured to start a family.
“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,” Williams said. “And then all of a sudden, all this pressure came off of my shoulders. Like it was just, all this weight just fell off my shoulders once I did that.”
Since then, Williams said she’s 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.
With advances in technology, Williams said she felt relieved knowing she had options.
She added that sharing her own experiences and having more open conversations about fertility could help women better understand the options available to them.
“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 welcomed their first daughter, Olympia, in September 2017, when the tennis star was 35. The couple married later that year and welcomed their second daughter, Adira, in 2023.
Williams said she doesn’t have a specific parenting philosophy she sticks to, but she does have clear ideas about how she wants to raise her daughters.
“As organized as I am in my life, like to a point where everything is labeled, my parenting skills are different,” she said.
Her main approach to parenting is being present for her children and striving to be the best mother she can be. “Everything is around my kids,” Williams said.
“I want to raise my children. I’m a person that’s raising my kids, and that’s teaching them how I want them to live and how I want them to be,” she added.
Williams isn’t the only celebrity to have spoken about egg freezing.
In November 2022, Jennifer Aniston said she wished someone had encouraged her to freeze her eggs when she was younger.
“I was throwing everything at it. I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed,” Aniston said.
In March 2023, Priyanka Chopra said 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. 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,” she said.
