May 01, 2024
Bruce Kluckhohn/USA TODAY Sports
Carli Lloyd, a retired U.S. soccer player from South Jersey, is expecting her first child.
Retired U.S. soccer star Carli Lloyd announced her first pregnancy on Wednesday and opened up about the arduous journey it took to get to the joyous moment.
Lloyd — who grew up in Delran Township and attended Rutgers University — wrote on Instagram that she and her husband, professional golfer Brian Hollins, are expecting a baby in October. In addition to the social media announcement, she penned an article for Women's Health, intimately detailing her "secret journey involving unexplained infertility and multiple rounds of IVF treatments."
Lloyd, 41, works as a Fox Sports correspondent and soccer analyst. Before that, she enjoyed a successful soccer career, helping the U.S. women's national soccer team win two World Cups and two Olympic gold medals. She said she always wanted to be a mom, but over her 34-year soccer career, her "sole mission" was to become the best player in the world. She retired in 2021 at the age of 39, but things didn't necessarily slow down — she still had to travel around the world for appearances, photo or video shoots and speaking engagements.
"Having a baby was on our mind, and I thought putting it off for a little bit longer to enjoy life wouldn’t pose an issue," Lloyd wrote in Women's Health. "For the first time, soccer wasn’t my priority. I could actually choose what I wanted to do and spend time with Brian, my family, and my friends without soccer consuming my mind and body. (In retrospect, I wish I had been more educated about pregnancy and how to prepare for it, and that I looked years ago into the options I had for freezing my eggs.)"
In the summer of 2022, she and her husband, who live in New Jersey, decided to begin trying to get pregnant. While Lloyd was used to "defying odds" on the field, getting pregnant turned out to be an entirely different type of challenge.
Lloyd said that what came next felt like a race against her "40-year-old biological clock." The odds were stacked against her: Fertility begins to decline by age 30, and by age 40, healthy women on average have only a 5% chance of getting pregnant each menstrual cycle.
Despite always taking care of herself — never smoking and rarely drinking alcohol — she felt like her body was failing her. At first, she hoped to get pregnant naturally — "because that’s what our bodies are supposed to be capable of" — but after months passed with the thought of getting pregnant "constantly" on her mind, she decided to schedule a consultation with the "highly recommended" Dr. Louis Manara at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Fertility in Voorhees.
Lloyd said Manara, who has been a fertility doctor since 1985, told her that at her age the "most straightforward route" would be IVF. In IVF, mature eggs are collected from the ovaries and fertilized by sperm in a lab. Then, a procedure is done to place the fertilized egg, called embryos, into the uterus.
Lloyd decided to move forward with the IVF. She recalls feeling "ashamed and embarrassed" at first, before changing her perspective.
Lloyd began her first round of IVF in April 2023. She and Hollins wanted to "stash as many embryos" as they could, in hopes that they could one day have two kids. She said that the pain of the injections, which are used to help the eggs mature, was the easy part. The difficult part was the "emotional toll" of waiting to see how many eggs were retrieved and whether they were usable.
After the eggs were retrieved, Lloyd and Hollis were told the numbers would likely dwindle after being fertilized, and further lessen when the embryos were sent for genetic testing. The first time, 20 eggs were retrieved but only three embryos made it to the next step, and only two came back genetically normal after testing.
"I felt all the emotions during my career — stress, worry, fear, anxiety — but I’d never felt all the emotions that IVF brought on," Lloyd wrote. "I felt completely out of control. It’s an indescribable roller coaster unless you go through it."
Along with being stressful, the process was also costly, as the couple's health insurance didn't cover it. Regardless, they went forward with more rounds of IVF. The second time around, zero embryos were cleared during genetic testing.
"The entire cycle was a wash — a complete waste of time and money," she wrote.
In October, a few months after returning home from the Women's World Cup in Australia, Lloyd and Hollins went through with their first embryo transfer. They had two frozen embryos and decided to move forward with one of them. Unfortunately, the first transfer didn't take, and Lloyd found out 12 days later that she was not pregnant.
While all this was happening, Lloyd's schedule was "insanely packed" with shoots, hosting soccer clinics, travel and appearances for the 2023 Women's World Cup. She had to put on a brave face while feeling "gutted" on the inside. Thankfully, she had a tight circle of support to comfort her when times got tough and encourage her to stay hopeful. She also said her faith was rekindled in the process, and that it caused her to really reconnect with her parents and siblings — who she was estranged from for years.
The couple then chose to do a third round of IVF, but this time Lloyd had a different mindset. She tried living in and enjoying the present, and surrendered to the mantra, "Whatever was meant to be would be." The third egg retrieval yielded four embryos, and two ended up being genetically normal.
Lloyd underwent a transfer procedure in January and was overjoyed to find out that she was finally pregnant.
It wasn't smooth sailing from there, as the embryo's growth was behind at first and Manara was concerned about a potential miscarriage. But the baby continued to progress and Lloyd and Hollins were able to graduate from the fertility clinic in Voorhees to the OB-GYN. Now, Lloyd and Hollins are "so excited" to be parents.
"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey," Lloyd wrote on Instagram. "I see you and I understand your pain. My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also with for more resources, funding, and eduction around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping!"
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