It was not until the summer of 2008, using donated eggs and sperm, that Fernandez became pregnant. I felt like tennis was so all-encompassing.” “I was so selfish in those years,” she said.
#Natasha zvereva gigi fernandez professional#
Fernandez thought back to all the menstrual periods she missed in her 20s because of her intense training and how, at the time, that proved more a convenience than a cause for concern.īased on her experience, Fernandez said she would counsel women in professional sports to start planning for motherhood in their late 20s, rather than a decade later as she did. The intense physical stress that world-class athletes subject their bodies to can lead to ovulation dysfunction.
I would have never risked taking the hormones and the retrieval and dealing with any adverse effects. In a telephone interview, Keefe, who did not treat Fernandez, said he would advise professional athletes in their early 20s to consider freezing their eggs.įernandez said: “I would not have done that because I was so psychotic about my body. Keefe, the chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at New York University Langone Medical Center, said natural fertility rates for women declined gradually from ages 35 to 38 and more precipitously after that. It is sound advice in matters of reproduction, too.ĭr. So your biological clock is ticking, but you’re in denial.”įernandez tells her tennis students to always play the percentages. “As an athlete, you have this attitude, ‘I can do anything with my body,’ ” Fernandez said. They had been a couple for five years when they decided to have a child, neither dreaming such an elemental desire would become such a nightmare. And Fernandez’s passionate nature makes life more vibrant for Geddes, who has degrees in criminology and law and works for the L.P.G.A. Geddes’s optimistic and easygoing demeanor smoothes Fernandez’s jagged edges. She met Geddes, four years older and an 11-time winner on the L.P.G.A. “It was crushing,” Fernandez said, adding, “I felt almost like I wished I would have never played tennis.”įernandez’s globe-trotting career made it difficult to sustain a long-term relationship. Seven unsuccessful fertility treatments later, Fernandez sat with her partner, Jane Geddes, and listened numbly as her doctor said that her eggs were old and that her Hall of Fame tennis career had contributed to her inability to conceive.
She was imbued with the world-class athlete’s mind-set that where there’s a will, there’s a way. The odds of becoming pregnant plunge for women over 35, but Fernandez, whose grace at the net was often overshadowed by a trigger temper, forged ahead. It was only when she tried to have a baby in her 40s that she found herself on the wrong side of the line. She told the women gathered around her to picture the line as the edge of a cliff: they stepped beyond it at their peril.įernandez always seemed perfectly positioned on the court, winning 17 Grand Slam doubles titles and reaching No. During a doubles lesson at an Orlando sports club this month, Gigi Fernandez dragged her tennis racket along the service line.
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