Female Fertility and Athleticism: Two Sides of the Same Coin 

As a former Olympic figure skater, I followed the Winter Olympics this past February with great interest. Over the course of two and a half weeks, I watched and appreciated the athletes’ performances, but I also noticed the larger themes that emerged: the stories told by and about the athletes that made headlines and captured the public interest. Two of these themes in particular caught my attention. The first was motherhood. While it was once nearly unheard of for women to continue competing at the highest levels after having children, this Olympic Games included a surprising number of Olympian mothers. I was particularly struck by the viral, positive coverage of two mothers—the Italian Francesca Lollobrigida and the American Elana Meyers Taylor—who won gold with their young children in attendance. The story was one of empowerment: women can excel as athletes and mothers! 

The other theme was an entirely different story: the story of how the sports world all too often views female athletes’ capacity for motherhood as something to be feared, suppressed, or even violated. This theme usually remains under the surface, invisible and unspoken, and for many spectators I’m sure this Olympics was no different. For me, however, it came roaring into view with the controversy swirling around the French ice dance team of Laurence Fournier-Beaudry and Guillaume Cizeron. Cizeron’s former ice dance partner, Gabriella Papadakis, had released a bombshell memoir just before the Olympics. Among other disturbing revelations, Papadakis wrote that leading up to the World Championships in 2019, she became unexpectedly pregnant and sought an abortion. Due to the delayed effect of the abortion pill she took, she performed in the World Championship exhibition gala while still bleeding and experienced severe emotional distress with little support from her team. Hearing Papadakis’s story made me acutely aware that many of the female athletes competing in the Olympics had probably sacrificed, or been pressured to sacrifice, their capacity to bear new life—and, at times, even that life itself. 

The tragic ending of Papadakis’s story stood in stark contrast to the Olympian mothers being celebrated on social media and television. One might conclude that this contrast simply shows the hypocrisy of the sports world and leave it at that; however, I believe that a closer look at both of these themes not only helps to illuminate the challenges facing women in sports, but helps us to paint a more complete picture of women’s capabilities. While there is a tension between women’s fertility and high-level athletics, the beautiful examples of Olympic motherhood on display in February were a reminder that the capacity to bear children is not inherently opposed to success in sports. As a matter of justice, the world of sports must learn to accommodate and celebrate women’s natural fertility; at the same time, seeing women excel at the highest levels of sport is a powerful antidote to the age-old tendency to reduce women to their child-bearing capacity and can help our culture to better appreciate the many facets of women’s excellence. 

Sports vs. the Female Body 

Some might hear Papadakis’s story of pregnancy and abortion and assume it is an isolated incident. But her story points to a problem that is deeply embedded in elite athletic culture: the rejection of the female body and particularly female fertility. The most extreme and obvious manifestation of this problem is abortion, yet it is impossible to know for certain just how common abortion is among elite female athletes. The evidence is largely anecdotal: athletes and coaches anxious about state regulations on abortion, the testimony of individual female athletes who have sought abortions, whispers about the epidemic of abortion among track and field athletes who believe they cannot get pregnant, an amicus brief in the Dobbs case signed by 500 top female athletes alleging that the success of women’s sports depends on abortion access. Weaving together these anecdotes is the narrative that pregnancy and athletic success are incompatible.   

You don’t need to look as far as abortion to realize that athletic culture is antagonistic toward female fertility, though. Take the prevalence of amenorrhea among female athletes. In my experience as a figure skater, athletes and coaches were often unconcerned with menstrual irregularities and ignorant of the long-term health consequences. Amenorrhea in young female athletes is often diagnosed as one component of the female athlete triad; another component is poor nutrition, often linked to disordered eating. Many sports have strong expectations about the athlete’s body type or “look,” and pressure to conform to this (often unrealistic) standard can lead to poor nutrition. While men face pressure to conform in some sports, it is striking how often the pressure on female athletes directly targets aspects of their physique that relate to fertility. For instance, in my own discipline of ice dancing, the expectation was to be as skinny as possible. The ideal female ice dancer was tall and lean, with minimal fat and curves. The wider hips, higher fat content, and rounded figure typical of the female body and closely tied to their ability to bear children were the very characteristics deemed undesirable by my sport. While I thankfully never developed an eating disorder, I did struggle to maintain proper nutrition due to these pressures. Fortunately, I was surrounded by family and doctors who prioritized my overall well-being and ensured that I maintained my health while continuing to train and excel at a high level. Sadly, this is not the case for many female athletes.  

The common factor among these examples is perhaps best summed up in Papadakis’s words. Describing her tears on the drive home from her abortion, Papadakis writes, “I treated my body like a machine, ashamed of having betrayed my team by inadvertently agreeing to become human, and the pressure suddenly hit me.” The world of sports tends to treat the body like a machine, not as an integral part of a human being. For elite athletes, everything—career, finances, education—rides on the body’s performance. This is true for men as well as women, but men can more easily imitate the “machine” ideal because their bodies are ordered toward creating life outside themselves. Women’s physical structure (ordered toward bearing children) and constantly fluctuating hormones are inconveniences that sports try to suppress and fit into the mold of a machine. Pregnancy is the ultimate reminder that the woman’s body is not a machine; when a female athlete gets pregnant, it suddenly becomes glaringly obvious that athletic success is not the sole purpose of the body. 

Critics on Both Sides 

To be fair, the sports world’s antagonism toward fertility is grounded in a grain of truth: it is impossible, or at least unsafe, to perform at the very highest levels of sport while heavily pregnant. It is also true that many of the male-female differences that contribute to generally lower levels of strength, speed, and endurance for women—for instance, women’s lower levels of testosterone and higher levels of body fat—are closely tied to female fertility. In this sense, then, women’s fertility is in tension with the demands of high-level athletics. We live in a culture where people on both sides of the political spectrum are profoundly uncomfortable with this tension. Many on the left respond by denying sexual difference in sports. Sweeping women’s physical differences—which are largely rooted in the capacity to carry and bring forth new life—under the rug, they argue for admitting biological males into women’s sports. When forced to confront sexual difference due to female athletes’ ability becomes pregnant, the left simply proposes birth control and abortion as the solutions. 

For those of us who see sex difference as an obvious reality, motherhood as a good, and every human life as sacred, these are clearly unacceptable solutions. While many conservatives have rightly focused on opposing efforts to deny sex difference in sports, there is a strain of conservative thought that responds to the fertility-athletics tension by downgrading women’s athletic abilities and opportunities. This is often implicit—where in the tradwife ideal would the thirty-year-old female Olympic athlete fit, exactly?—but at times manifests in claims that sports are inherently unfeminine and opposed to women’s capacity for motherhood. While there are valid concerns about the corruption of elite athletic culture and the antagonism of this culture toward natural female fertility, pronouncing sports to be unseemly or off-limits for women is an unfortunate overcorrection. 

There is no scientific or practical reason that women should be unable to play sports at the highest levels while respecting their bodies’ natural structure and fertility. While some worry that high levels of exercise will inevitably harm female fertility and overall health, the science doesn’t back this up. As Hannah Rowan recounted in her recent essay for The Lamp, Dr. Jerilynn Prior conducted a study on women who wanted to train for marathons without a negative impact on their menstrual cycles. She found that inadequate nutrition, not exercise itself, harmed these female athletes’ cycles. Similarly, some see the increased risk of certain injuries among female athletes and assume it is an unavoidable part of women’s sports. This conclusion simply assumes that sports (as they are currently practiced) are the unchangeable standard, and women’s bodies must conform to that standard or fail.  

Such attention has recently been given, for instance, to the epidemic of ACL tears among young female athletes. Girls are more prone to this injury than boys due to multiple factors, including wider hips and hormones tied to the menstrual cycle—both physical factors clearly tied to female fertility. However, there is strong evidence that preventive exercises largely eliminate this problem; the staggeringly high rates of injury are due to ignorance or carelessness in implementing these exercises. The problem isn’t that women’s fertile, healthy bodies aren’t suited for sports; the problem is that few people are willing to take the time to listen to women’s bodies and adjust training regimens accordingly.  

What about motherhood, though? Are motherhood and elite sports fundamentally incompatible, as some critics on both the right and the left have concluded? The answer is a resounding no. It might once have seemed that the only path for female athletes who wished to become mothers was to retire young and then have children. The increasing number of elite female athletes who have given birth and then returned to their sports has made it clear that athletic success and motherhood can go together, though. At the 2026 Winter Olympics, there were nine mothers on the U.S. team alone, and a record number of Olympic medal holders returned to this Olympic Games as mothers. Nor is this phenomenon limited to Winter Olympic athletes. Allyson Felix, one of the greatest track-and-field athletes ever, is well known for continuing her athletic career after becoming a mother and for championing maternal rights in sports. Serena Williams won the Australian Open early in her first pregnancy and returned to the highest level of tennis after giving birth. (After retiring for four years, she recently announced that she will once again return to competitive tennis.) The list goes on. To be clear, I’m not saying that every female athlete can or should have children during her athletic career. The sports-then-motherhood sequence is a viable path, and perhaps even the optimal path for many women in this situation. (While having children was not my motivation for stepping back from competitive skating at age twenty-two, the sports-motherhood sequencing worked quite well for me.) However, the athlete moms of the 2026 Olympics and beyond have shown us that, while there is a tension between elite sports and the capacity for motherhood, it is absurd to hold that the only solutions to this tension are either birth control and abortion or limitations on women’s participation in sports. 

A Path Forward 

Athletic culture must do a better job of affirming the goodness of women’s bodies and fertility. The frequency of illness, injury, and even abortion among female athletes points to a culture that views the human body as a machine, rather than an integral component of a human person. At the same time, the culture at large needs to adjust its view of women and sports to accommodate both female fertility and women’s extraordinary capacity for athletic excellence. Not all female athletes will become mothers during their athletic careers, but those who do are powerful reminders that, as a matter of justice, we need to respect female fertility and the female capacity for athletic excellence. Through their witness and advocacy, these athlete-mothers are already helping to rebuild women’s sports around the actual needs of women. 

I don’t think this is simply a matter of justice, though. These athlete-mothers challenge us to go further and change the way we think about physical excellence and what women are capable of. The dominant narratives of our culture force women to fit into a narrow category. Mainstream feminism, while rightly rejecting the age-old tendency to reduce women to their childbearing capacity, has also rejected the goodness of natural female fertility and pitted motherhood and success against one another. At the same time, popular anti-feminist narratives tend to lionize female fertility to the exclusion of women’s capacity for other types of excellence. The very existence of athlete-mothers at the highest levels of sports forces us to reconsider these narratives and acknowledge a far different truth: that motherhood and physical excellence are actually two sides of the same coin. 

This is a truth I have come to believe through my own experience of being an elite athlete and a mother. It has taken time for me to see this. During my earliest years of motherhood, the physical changes wrought by pregnancy and postpartum felt like the antithesis of everything I had trained my body to do as an athlete. Yet now, six years into motherhood, I no longer see motherhood as a departure from my athletic career, but instead as a continuation of it. The work of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing is physically demanding, and the ability of the female body to bear and sustain new life is as magnificent as any gold-medal-winning performance. I have come to see that the body of a mother—whether during pregnancy, postpartum, or while raising children—has a physical excellence, even an athleticism, about it. Even when a woman is not, or never has been, pregnant, her body is constantly pointing to this truth, preparing itself for new life with each cycle, always “in training” for the physical demands of motherhood.  

Most women don’t have the opportunity to learn this from firsthand experience, as I did. This is why I believe the witness of athlete-mothers is so powerful: they challenge people to see that the same woman, the same body, is capable of two different, yet equally demanding, types of physical excellence. Much can be said against the notion that women lack athletic excellence or that their fertility is an impediment to athletic success, but the most powerful counterargument is seeing women like Lollobrigida and Meyers Taylor perform jaw-dropping feats of strength and agility and then embrace their young children.  

This truth allows us to paint a broader, more realistic picture of women’s physical excellence, but it also points to a deeper truth. I keep returning to Papadakis’s heartrending lament that she “had inadvertently agreed to become human.” Her words remind me of Dorothy Sayers’s rhetorical question: “Are women human?” So many voices across our culture tell us that the answer is no, but elite athlete-mothers offer a resounding “yes” to this question. Almost without exception, these women speak of the positive changes that motherhood has wrought on their motivations and performance. Announcing her comeback attempt for the LA 2028 Olympics, Allyson Felix recently launched a website explaining her motivation: “What if motherhood makes you more, not less?” Francesca Lollobrigida has spoken of her desire to win for her son, Tommaso, and to be a role model for other women who want to pursue both sports and motherhood. Olympic bobsled medalist Kaillie Humphries, mother of a toddler boy, has said, “Motherhood … (has) fueled me to be bigger, faster, stronger.” And Elana Meyers Taylor, who won gold at the 2026 Olympics with her two young, special-needs boys in tow, has said, “My boys have become my why … At the beginning it was to make an Olympic team, to win an Olympic medal, to win an Olympic gold medal. … I want to show my boys that despite any obstacles you may face, you can overcome them and you can go after your goals.”  

Through their motherhood and their sports, these women have discovered their capacity, not just for physical excellence, but for human excellence: for virtue. They share this capacity with men, but they live it in a distinctly embodied, female way. Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from the Olympian mothers is that women are more than their bodies, and that we are all called to integrated human excellence, body and soul. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.