Sloane Stephens Wants Every Tennis Player to Have the Choice to Freeze Their Eggs

With her off season fast approaching, Sloane Stephens is getting ready to freeze her eggs for the second time. In 2022, the then-29-year-old pro tennis player froze her eggs with Kindbody in an effort to take charge of her future, and now at 31, she's partnering with the fertility clinic network to normalize the conversation around fertility, particularly in women's sports.

"As a professional athlete, especially as a female professional athlete, you know your time is limited — just understanding the clock is ticking and what that means for you and your family," says Stephens, who's also a stepmom to 9-year-old Cameron, her husband Jozy Altidore's son from a previous relationship. "For a female athlete, family planning relies on the woman to either stop her career or plan to adopt or have a surrogate, so you have to be super proactive in whatever you decide is best for you and your family."

While she "honestly has no idea" how much longer she'll play tennis professionally, she wants to ensure she has options in case she struggles to get pregnant in the future. "When I froze my eggs the first time, I was like, 'OK, if I play tennis for another year or two, this will be good,'" she says. "So now that it's been two years, I'm like, 'Well, if I play for another two or three years, then what?' I may stop playing next year. I have no idea, but being proactive to me is the best medicine in this case."

When Serena Williams announced she was "evolving away" from tennis to expand her family in 2022, she famously wrote, "Believe me, I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family." Naomi Osaka dealt with constant questioning of her commitment to her career after welcoming her daughter in 2023. Stephens doesn't want any other tennis players, or women athletes in general, to face that same struggle. "I salute all the moms who have a baby and come back and play, but it is hard," she says. "It's really difficult. Managing yourself as a professional athlete at the highest level is already difficult."

Family planning has long been top of mind for Stephens. She has always wanted a big family with five or so kids, and her grandfather was an ob-gyn, so egg freezing was something she learned about early on. But she was also afraid of childbirth, being aware of the US's maternal-mortality crisis and the fact that Black women are three times more likely than white women to die of pregnancy-related causes. "The conversation has always been very scary for me," Stephens says. "But being proactive, not only in my egg-freezing journey, but in general — finding out more information, seeing what I would need, knowing about my body, and educating myself on childbirth — has helped me relax a little bit. I've now settled on, OK, I'm not so mortified of childbirth, but I'm also making sure I have other options here, like surrogacy."

She describes her first egg-freezing experience as "seamless," though she knows it's different for everyone. "I had done all the research, I had all the information, I had all the right tools," she says, adding that Kindbody was able to accommodate her unique circumstances as a professional athlete, such as scheduling a combination of in-person and virtual appointments and understanding medications banned from mandatory drug-testing.

With her journey, Stephens isn't just taking control of her own future — she also wants to make sure future tennis players can do the same. As a member of the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) Players' Council, she's currently advocating for egg freezing to be instituted as a protected activity, so players can undergo fertility treatments during the season without penalty, instead of waiting for a small window in their off season. (Typically requested for injuries, protected rankings are a provision that allows players to step away from the sport without it affecting their ranking.)

"I feel like we should all have the option to have children, but we shouldn't have to stop our careers," she says. "Men athletes don't have to stop their careers to have a baby and come back. They get to play through their whole careers and do whatever it is they want, however it is that they want to do it. Obviously, it is a different situation, but I feel like especially on our tour, everyone should have the opportunity to feel like they have the option. A lot of people feel like they don't, and that I think is very scary."

Stephens has already inspired two other pro tennis players to freeze their eggs. "A lot of the girls on tour were like, 'OK, so what happened? What did you do? How long did it take? Did you have to skip a tournament?' Having those conversations and just talking about it and helping them understand what the process is has helped a lot of people."

The tennis star plans to undergo her second cycle of egg freezing in her off season at the end of the year. While the timeline for planning her family remains unclear, she's grateful for having choices when the time comes. "I am giving myself options, so that I'm not going to be 35 or however old being like, 'I should probably stop now because if I want to have kids, it has to be now or never.' I don't want to be in that situation, and no one wants to be in that situation."

Yerin Kim is the features editor at POPSUGAR, where she helps shape the vision for special features and packages across the network. A graduate of Syracuse University's Newhouse School, she has over five years of experience in the pop culture and women's lifestyle spaces. She's passionate about spreading cultural sensitivity through the lenses of lifestyle, entertainment, and style.