Sportscaster Erin Andrews spent most of her 20s and 30s building her career on the sidelines of NHL and NFL games, becoming one of the most well-known figures in sports broadcasting in the process. But when she was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2016, she started getting serious about another dream: having a family with her then boyfriend, now husband, retired hockey player Jarret Stoll. What followed was nearly 10 years of fertility treatments, heartbreak, and struggle, but the couple never lost hope.
Two weeks ago Andrews and Stoll were overjoyed to welcome their first child, son Mack, via surrogate. Here, she tells Glamour about her long road to motherhood, how she stayed grounded through heartbreak and loss, and why she is now committed to making surrogacy more accessible for every family.
I was very work-driven immediately out of college. I just always had this mindset that I wanted to do as much as I could. In my 20s, I remember saying that I wanted to do as much as I could before I hit 40. So then, if I wanted to take time and have a baby, I would do that. Everything in my life happened really fast when I first landed with ESPN, and then I went to Fox Sports. I was working multiple sports a week. So my personal life really took a backseat.
I started freezing my eggs late. I started at 35. I kind of figured, All right, I haven’t met Prince Charming yet, I don’t really know when this is gonna happen. I had a feeling I wanted to be a mom, but I was married to my job.
I was having a good time. I felt like I wasn’t ready to settle down, and I hadn’t found the guy to settle down with yet. Back then, it wasn’t really put into the back of our heads that freezing your eggs was a good idea for insurance. Young girls ask me all the time: “What would you recommend about sports broadcasting?” I’d say, Freeze your eggs, and then worry about football. I just wish somebody had said that to me in my 20s. I had a lot of summers I wasn’t doing much, and that would’ve been a good time to do it. I feel like when I started freezing my eggs, it was kind of like, “Sh, I’m freezing my eggs.” It was still hush-hush, which is so bizarre to me now after going through all of this.
Three years into dating my husband, I was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Then we really had to deal with some big-time stuff. I mean, we weren’t even engaged yet. My oncologist, who I love so much, sat me and my now husband down and just said, “Look, I’ll be honest. We don’t know if we’re gonna have to do a hysterectomy or not, but let’s start talking about freezing some eggs.’ Now, I had frozen eggs. I had done a couple rounds before I was diagnosed with cervical cancer, but I was having a hard time producing them. I should have been doing it more and more and more because by the time I was 39, I had been diagnosed with cancer, I was in a rush. My body was stressed out. I had to get it done.
I didn’t even know if my husband was going to propose. I don’t even know how much he was really paying attention to fertility until we sat down with an oncologist who said, “You have to do this.” And then it was kind of a mission to get some eggs and make embryos. Look, my husband is a two-time winning Stanley Cup hockey player. He was not thinking, We’re gonna struggle at this. You're not really thinking, This may be really, really hard. There’s no way in hell either one of us thought when we said “I do,” or even when we first started dating, we thought it would be this journey at all. We had to put our big-boy, big-girl pants on real quick. Once we saw that it was hard for me to make eggs, it was hard for us to do embryos, and then I was dealing with cervical cancer. Before that conversation with my oncologist, there really wasn’t much conversation with him about fertility. And then, it was just like, I’m gonna do this.
Women may be intimidated to talk about fertility with men. Sometimes we don’t want to have the conversation about just getting engaged. Imagine having to broach the subject of fertility. That’s not easy either. But honestly, my advice to any woman is just do your thing. And until you become a unit, you have to worry about you. And that’s something I was proud of myself for doing. But obviously things got real for us.
I had multiple surgeries for cancer. Thank goodness they were able to get it out of me. I didn’t have to have further treatments after my two surgeries, but then it was a mission to get some eggs and make embryos, and we just were not having success. We'd go down the path where it’s like, you have to wait 10 days for the eggs to mature, then you’d make the embryo, then you’d have to wait another 10 days. And then it’s genetic testing and all that kind of stuff. It took years, and we were just having tons of failed attempts at getting pregnant.
I think that so many people are going through fertility struggles and they don’t want to talk about it. For a while, it feels like a little bit of an embarrassment, especially when you’ve had success in your life in other areas, like my husband and I have. You expect things to come easy and they don’t. It doesn’t matter who you are. After a while, like after my seventh, eighth round of IVF treatment, I was just like, I’m so done being quiet about this. I think I went on my podcast and I just said, “It sucks and it’s taken a toll on my body.” I lost hair. My skin was never the same. My body’s never really been the same.
You’re a total cranky bitch. You just are because you’re pumping all this stuff into your body. Your husband or your boyfriend or your family members, they don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to do. I’m working a football game and I’m having to run up when the timer goes off; it doesn’t matter what time zone you’re in, you have to inject yourself at the right time. I’ve literally left the field in the third quarter to have security run me to a bathroom where I’m, like, running with a needle. In that situation, you get your shots done real quick. The medication still stings, but when you gotta be down on the field because an interception was thrown, you just do it.
Finally in 2020, it was the pandemic and we were sitting in our house by ourselves, away from our friends, like everybody else. We had Easter alone without our friends who all had kids. And we just decided, I’m not getting pregnant. I can’t attempt to do any more transfers into my uterus because I’m going to lose these embryos. We don’t have many embryos to work with. That was our biggest problem. We didn’t have many. We just decided we should take the surrogacy route because this sucks. We’re sitting here alone. We’re not getting any younger. What are we doing? We need to bite the bullet. So it was right after that in the summer that we started to make some moves.
We started touching base with surrogacy companies, and we just thought it was going to work. We were just like, “We’re gonna put two embryos in and then we’re gonna be done, and it’s going to be a boy and a girl.” We knew it was a risk because we didn’t have many embryos. But we just thought, “Okay, if we don’t get two babies, we’ll at least get one and this is going to work.” We had a lovely family we were paired with in 2021 and we transferred the embryos and we were so excited.
We lost the two babies. And that was really, really hard. It was awful. It was right before Father’s Day. They called and said it didn’t work. We went to our friend’s house after we lost the babies and we were a mess. I remember the Friends reunion came out and we sat and watched it and laughed because we were sick of crying.
It’s hard seeing other couples have kids. After we lost ours, you see things like “so and so is having their second.” And we’re like, “We can’t even get one. Like, what are we doing here? What are we doing wrong?” That Father’s Day weekend we went to go be with all our friends. We blew it out that weekend because they knew we were sad. We were sitting there, we were watching everybody in the pool, and I remember my husband just looking at me. I told him, “It’s going to be okay. I don’t know how it’s gonna be okay, but it’s gonna be okay.”
I actually did a really bad job at kind of dealing with it. Usually when stuff happens in my life, I’m back on the football field, you know, saying, “I’m good, I’m good. I don’t have time for this.” I really kind of gloss over some things. It wasn’t until a month later, my friends were like, “You’re not handling this.” I was forgetting words in my sentences. I just couldn’t hold a thought for very long. I was crying at a drop of a hat. I remember my manager, who’s one of my best friends, pulled me aside and she goes, “I think you’ve got to deal with this.”
We had dealt with so much failure up to that point that I was like, I don't know how this is ever going to work. But we dealt with it, and then our loss led us to this organization that helped us find our new surrogate. We were matched with five different women. Since we didn’t have many embryos, our doctor was really, really picky. He would pair us with a woman and we would meet her on Zoom and we’d be so excited. And then she’d go get checked out and he’d call and say no. And it was like, Oh my God. We did it five times and then we found our girl.
I remember the day we were going to find out if the transfer worked was a Monday. I was flying home from a game and I had glazed over it. I had told myself, “Let me get through these football games and then I’ll worry about if she’s pregnant or not.” I was on the plane and I looked out the window and I just started bawling. Because I was like, “What if it doesn’t work? Holy shit, here we go. If the results are bad, I don’t know what that’s going to do to him or I. We don’t have much left. Please work. Please work.” And also, another thing people don’t get when you start working with a surrogate and you get close to them, you want it to work for them too. I just kept texting my husband: “I’m having a panic attack on the plane.”
Going through this before and having had losses, you start losing the feeling in your limbs. The day we were supposed to find out, I remember my husband’s stomach was starting to turn; he felt like he was sick. I had gotten home and we were sitting there and we weren’t expecting to find out until about 4:00 or 5:00. I was just laying on the couch and I just kept saying to him, “My chest is so tight, I’m worried about my heart.” He was just going upstairs and then coming back downstairs.
Finally it was 5:00 and we hadn’t heard anything. I finally called the clinic and I just said, “My chest can’t take this, what’s happening?” And they said, “You’re going to have to wait till tomorrow because the test results were delayed.” I started bawling, my husband started crying. Then Jarrett looked at me and he goes, “You know what? Get your clothes on. We’re going to Hollywood.” So we called an Uber. We made drinks on the way because we knew if we sat at the house we were going to drive each other crazy. We met our friends, we drank an incredible amount of alcohol, and it was the only way we could deal with it.
At 7:00 a.m. we got a call from the fertility office. We were both so hungover and I was like, “Hello?” And it was my nurse and she was so excited. She goes, “Erin, you’re pregnant. You guys are pregnant.” I was like, “Okay, thank you.” I couldn’t tell if I wanted to throw up because I had drunk too much or because I was so nervous.
Experiencing pregnancy with our surrogate was amazing. I tell everybody she was the perfect fit for us because she was calm, positive, and just so loving. Maybe the opposite of me with the calm part, which I think my husband was very happy about. My girl was very special. When the baby was starting to get bigger, she’d turn on the playoffs because she’d say, “I want him to hear your voice.”
It was wonderful. Look, it’s scary. You don’t want to force a relationship. But she had done it before, and she is an angel. She has two kids of her own. She’s a good mom, she’s a great wife, she’s a fantastic friend. So our friendship with her and her husband just started growing and growing and progressing. We’d go to lunch with them and see them. I had them go to a hockey game one time.
There’s still a stigma surrounding surrogacy, and some people feel shame. I think people think that if you are not carrying the baby, it’s not your baby. I know the one thing my husband kept saying to people is, “It’s our baby. It’s our baby.” And I was like, “You don’t have to say that.” But that worked for him for a while, you know? He wanted to just say, “This is our DNA.”
I’d like to see it not be such a sensitive thing in conversations. I know people don’t know what to say, but lean in a little bit. Also, I want people that are going through it not to be embarrassed about it. I think in the beginning we were like, “Oh, gosh, we have to go this route.” Now I don’t care.
I didn’t know how I was going to do during the birth, I didn’t know how it was going to be. But when that nurse grabbed me, and said, “She wants to hold your hand,” I was like, “Let’s go. “ I grabbed her hand. My husband and I turned into sports fans. We were like, “You got this! Come on!”
It was awesome. We have this one picture that’s really, really special. They put Mack on her chest as they were cleaning him up and my husband was cutting the cord. In the photo I’m kissing her head. It’s the picture of what surrogacy is.
After everything, in that moment, you forget about what got you there and you just are so grateful that these people are in your life, that there are people that help you find them, and that they’re willing to do this. You forget about all the loss, you forget about all the facts that I was unable to carry—I’ve had so many losses—and so forth. You are just so happy that your baby is here. You don’t care about what led you here.
I could scream from the rooftops that if this is the route you have to go down, don’t be ashamed. We have to start talking about it more, being comfortable about having this conversation. And then maybe insurance companies can help, maybe organizations can step in that want to help families fund these kinds of things. People don’t know that there are certain nonprofits out there that will help you go through this journey and help you get a baby.
We worked with Family Match Consulting, which was part of the group that paired us with our surrogate. I had these long conversations throughout our pregnancy with the founder, Stephanie Levich, about how this just isn’t right, this isn’t fair. We need to help other people be able to do this. She had mentioned to me that she always attends events for this group called Baby Quest out here in Los Angeles. They are a group that actually helps raise funds and selects different families or people to help them with their infertility journey. So that’s something I am really looking forward to trying to be a part of, seeing what we can do to help families as well. I kind of feel like I’m like the mom from Mary Poppins, but instead of yelling “Votes for Women,” I’m saying “Help Families!” Because it’s just unfair and everybody should be able to deal with this joy and have all this baby crap around their house.
The best part of being a mom so far is seeing my husband with Mack. He’s wanted a baby forever. Just sitting there watching my husband with him. He was so excited to just sit and watch Seinfeld with him. I’m excited for this next chapter. I’m excited to watch a game with my kid. I can’t wait to watch Monday Night Football with my son. I know he is going to be a little young as we turn it on in the next few months, but I’m super pumped about it and I’m excited to take him to the hockey rink. Not so much to see him on skates; we’ve got a couple years for that.
You know, my husband’s been sitting around a locker room for so many years, and when he played in the NHL, he had so many of his teammates bring cigars in when they had babies. We had struggled for so long and then he retired, and that was the one thing he wanted to do that he never did. So on the Fourth of July, we went to our friend’s house. He was just so excited to pass out cigars to his old teammates, and they sat around the table. I just loved sitting back and watching the boys who, you know, he had won Stanley Cups with, have cigars in their mouth and be like, “Congrats.” It was just really, really cool.
For more on Erin Andrews and her journey to motherhood, check out her podcast, Calm Down with Erin and Charissa.