Serena Williams had a terrifying childbirth experience with her firstborn, Olympia. The tennis pro, who is married to Alexis Ohanian was forced into an emergency C-section after Olympia’s heart rate dropped during contractions. Thankfully, Olympia was safe, but Serena nearly died after complications.
After such a terrifying experience, Serena handled her second child, Adira'sGlamour for Women of the Year, the 43-year-old opened up about her two experiences with childbirth. Emergency C-sections are scary enough, but Serena was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism, a life-threatening blockage in a lung artery caused by a blood clot that had traveled from elsewhere in the body. Then, her surgical wound opened, and when she returned to surgery, doctors found a hematoma, which is a collection of blood that pools outside of blood vessels.
The experience left Serena on bed rest for six weeks, and once she returned to good health, she reveled in motherhood with Olympia as her only child. A few years later when she learned that she was expecting Adira, born in August 2023, she took matters into her own hands with her childbirth. "This time I went in with a plan. I like to say I put my best effort out there, and this was no different," she said. "I literally thought about it as a Grand Slam: How can I succeed?”
Remembering the trauma and danger that came with Olympia's birth, she did not take any chances and scheduled a C-section ahead of time, with four doctors on call. She made her peace with the delivery and knew she would not have the experience of labor. But she is grateful to have experienced what she did the first time, “because looking back, I’ll never have that moment again,” she told the outlet. “For whatever weird reason, that kind of makes me a little sad, but that’s probably a party of one."
How Serena handled postpartum hormones
While she planned ahead for the birth, you can't plan for the postpartum hormones. She experienced it after Olympia and again with Adira. “You never know when it can happen,” she explained. “It could be a month; it could be a week. It could take a year for things to settle down a lot." As for what helped, she said, "It’s really just keeping a positive environment and giving yourself grace and understanding.”
