The U.S. women’s soccer team is currently competing in the World Cup, and several mothers of young children are on the roster.
One of them is 31-year-old Julie Ertz, who gave birth to son Madden last August before making the third World Cup appearance of her career. She told the New York Times she’d initially been unsure whether she would return to soccer after having a baby, saying, “I didn’t know if I’d be back. I just didn’t know if that was going to be logistically possible. I don’t think any athlete wants to ever hang up their boots. But, you know, you become a mom and your whole life changes.”
Like Ertz, Casey Krueger is another National Women’s Soccer League player who gave birth for the first time in 2022. Krueger had her son via emergency Cesarean section in July, just one month before Ertz. But while she, too, trained intensely to regain her pre-pregnancy fitness, during her time off other players moved up through the ranks and she didn’t make it on the national team. She told the Times, “It was a risk I was willing to take. But as soon as you see [your child’s] precious face, you realize that they’re worth anything.”
Mom-athletes “sacrifice a lot to do what what we do”
All the moms interviewed for the Times story understand the challenges inherent in integrating their family and professional lives. Cheyna Mathews of the Jamaican women’s national soccer team is mom to “three beautiful boys.” She called motherhood “the most fun experience I’ve ever had. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.” But she freely admitted the difficulty of being away from her husband and children for extended periods of time. Her oldest son asked her, “Why are you always gone so long? That’s too many days.” Through tears, she acknowledged, “We [moms who are professional athletes] sacrifice a lot to do what we do.”
She added, “Your kids don’t hear complaints. They don’t know what that is. You could be sick, disappointed, sad, or tired. They’re gonna want the same energy from you every single time, and I think that carries over on to the pitch for me.”
Fortunately, women’s professional sports teams in the U.S. are finally, gradually shifting to alleviate some part of the weighty pressure mom-athletes feel. According to the Times article, U.S. women’s soccer benefits now include nanny coverage along with “daily travel stipends and paid transportation for children and their caregivers.”
This was likely part of the reason a record five mothers plus their children participated in the national team’s April training camp.
U.S. drives maternity coverage shifts in professional women’s sports internationally
But while some U.S. female professional sports teams have gradually shifted their benefits packages and other policies to be more child- and family-friendly, culture in other countries has been slower to change.
According to the Times, as recently as 2021 pro soccer player Sara Bjork Gunnarsdottir of Iceland had to fight to secure paid maternity leave from the French team she played for at the time. Soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, currently requires that female players receive 14 weeks of job-protected maternity leave at two-thirds pay, comparable to the short-term disability coverage many white-collar American companies offer their employees.
Sarai Bareman, FIFA’s head of women’s soccer, weighed in on the gains in maternity coverage and benefits that led eight mom-athletes to bring their kids to the World Cup this year. She commented, “I think it’s very much driven by North America, because we’ve seen some very high-profile returning mothers. I honestly feel that has influenced a lot of other female players around the world to be more publicly open about the fact that, yes, they’ve got kids, too. Their kids are there. That’s a massive, massive part of their life.”
An opportunity gap persists for mom-athletes in the minor leagues
Still, female professional athletes recognize that many other mothers in the minor leagues will never make it to the national level because they don’t receive the support and resources they need to succeed as mothers and competitors.
Jessica McDonald, mom to Jeremiah, played on the World Cup-winning U.S. women’s team in 2019. She observed, “There’s a lot of talented women out there who have thrown away their talent to be moms because they didn’t have support from [minor league] coaches or enough pay. And if that didn’t happen, I firmly believe that there would be more moms on the national team right now.”
Mom-athletes keep the big picture in mind
Just as there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to motherhood, playing at the elite level while mothering young children doesn’t necessarily appeal to or make sense for every mom-athlete.
Professional golfer Amy Olson recently competed in the U.S. Women’s Open while 31 weeks pregnant. Olson, who did not advance past the second round, grasped the reality of pregnancy’s impact on her body, her swing, etc., and the likelihood that she’d be able to put in a winning performance.
She reflected, “I know what it takes to play at the elite level and play in a major championship,” she said. “Realistically, my ball-striking is not there right now. Do I think I can post a good score? Yes. But to say I can be competitive, that’s probably a stretch. With the weight gain, I don’t think this is going to be anybody’s formula for success.”
But Olson refused to lose sight of the bigger picture. She noted, “There is a narrative in our culture that women can do everything, and I think that puts a lot of pressure on women to be good at everything all at the same time. There are different seasons in life, and you have to embrace each season, be grateful and joyful in each of those seasons.”
That same desire to embrace a different season in life has prompted some female athletes, like tennis star Serena Williams, to retire in order to focus on raising a family.
Not all professional women’s sports team policies are truly pro-motherhood
Some U.S. pro women’s sports teams are taking a different approach, incentivizing players who prioritize their team’s “needs” now by offering the promise, or hope, of childbearing later.
As Live Action News previously reported, the WNBA’s most recent collective bargaining agreement required subsidies for adoption, surrogacy, egg freezing, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and other assisted reproductive technologies that benefit the teams’ financial bottom lines by encouraging players to delay (or outsource altogether) pregnancy and the maternity leave that inevitably follows.
Such policies are a natural consequence of a culture that accepts and even promotes abortion as a necessary tool for women’s empowerment and understands childbearing to be just one lifestyle choice among many. After all, bearing and raising humans is certainly more costly than “fur baby parenting” or “plant parenting.”
If all forms of parenting truly are equal, why not encourage women to indefinitely postpone or even outsource this physically, emotionally, and financially expensive type?
What fertility says about female athletes’ health
This same culture lacks an understanding that regular ovulation, on which the ability to get pregnant relies, is actually a fifth vital sign of overall health in the female body. The process of ovulation benefits women’s bone, breast, brain, heart, and immune health. The menstrual cycle is especially important for athletes in particular, since amenorrhea, or lack of menstruation, is a telltale sign of the female athlete triad that indicates high vulnerability to injury, heart and immune system problems, and even infertility.
Respect for the woman’s natural body, including its limited biological window of fertility, leads to the type of policies put in place by the U.S. Women’s National Team. While policies like the WNBA’s may implicitly or explicitly pressure women to compartmentalize their desires for motherhood and family life, the high visibility of children with their mothers at the World Cup invites other mom-athletes to dream bigger, not smaller.
With adequate support, many more women can experience, as Julie Ertz did, the life-changing power of motherhood.
