After basketball superstar Breanna Stewart helped her team win the gold medal in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, she immediately hopped on a plane back to California for the birth of her first child.
"I flew from Tokyo to Los Angeles and from LAX went straight to the hospital, basically," she says. Her and wife, former WNBA player Marta Xargay Casademont, were waiting on the birth of their first child via surrogate. Ruby Mae arrived just one day after Stewart's Olympic win.
Now a mom of two, Stewart is gearing up to play in her third Olympic Games in Paris, France, this summer.
Stewart's journey to motherhood started in an unexpected way. "I ruptured my Achilles [when I was 24], and someone who worked within my agency at that time was like, 'Hey, have you ever thought about freezing your eggs?'" It was not yet part of Stewart's plan, but the hiatus from training gave her the perfect opportunity to go through the procedure. "I wasn't playing and looking back, it was one of the best decisions I've made."
Stewart began her professional career at age 22 right out of college as the first overall pick at the 2016 WNBA draft and earned Rookie of the Year that same season. She led her team, the Seattle Storm, to two championships before signing with the New York Liberty in 2023. In between, she navigated the path to parenthood. Stewart froze her eggs in 2019 and welcomed her first baby with Xargay Casademont, daughter Ruby, via a surrogate in 2021.
"Neither Marta nor I were particularly ready to carry a baby, which is okay," Stewart says of their decision to use a surrogate. At the time, Marta was also playing basketball professionally. (She's an Olympic medalist as well!) "So we decided to use a surrogate for Ruby."
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Xargay Casademont delivered their second baby, a son named Theo Josep, in October 2023. "We knew he was going to be big, just the genetics behind it," says Stewart — Ruby was born 9 pounds 4 ounces. "But we weren't expecting that big. For [Marta] to handle that all was pretty amazing. And when the doctors are like, 'He's 11 pounds, 12 ounces,' we were like, 'What?'"
Now, in addition to training for this year's games, she advocates for egg freezing to almost anyone she meets. "I think it's really important for me to talk about my fertility journey because sometimes people aren't able to understand [that there are] other ways of family planning," she says. "That's why I wanted to be so open and genuine about it in hopes of helping someone else or making them feel more comfortable whenever they decide to go through their journey."
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