Last Wednesday, Serena Williams posted a selfie to Snapchat that showed her in a bright yellow one-piece swimsuit, her body cocked to the side to reveal a small but distinct baby bump. Beneath the photo was the caption “20 weeks.” Fans on the Internet went wild, then did some arithmetic, and determined that, if Williams was indeed twenty weeks into a pregnancy, she had likely been pregnant during her record-breaking win at the Australian Open, in January. (Williams later deleted the Snapchat post, but a spokesperson confirmed that she and her fiancé, the Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, are expecting a baby in the fall, and that she’ll return to the tour in 2018.) This calculation seemed to prove that Williams was even more superhuman an athlete than was previously understood. The model Brooklyn Decker, who had her first child with her husband, the tennis player Andy Roddick, in 2015, tweeted, “She won a grand slam pregnant. I needed Andy to dress me, carry me, and delicately place me on the toilet when I was 4 weeks pregnant.” The popular Twitter account @CommonWhiteGirl wrote, “Idgaf who you think the greatest athlete ever is. They didn't win a major title pregnant.”
While it’s true that Williams’s victory in Australia is mind-boggling, in some ways—it was, for one thing, her twenty-third Grand Slam singles title—the amazed reaction to the very idea of her competing while pregnant also suggests that, in many people’s minds, childbearing and athletics are incompatible activities. In fact, as Title IX continues through its fifth decade, and more women compete at the highest levels of professional sports, numerous athletes have managed to start families without interrupting their careers. In 2009, the golfer Catriona Matthew won the Brazil Cup on the L.P.G.A. tour when she was five months pregnant with her second child; eleven weeks later, she won the Women’s British Open. The beach-volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings won a gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics while five weeks pregnant. The Olympic distance runner Kara Goucher trained throughout her pregnancy with her son, and even went for a run on the day she went into labor. “Labor is a pretty intense workout,” Dr. Joanne Stone, the director of maternal fetal medicine at Mount Sinai Health System, told me. “People with a high level of fitness going into pregnancy can generally keep exercising till the end.”
Last summer, the élite runner Sarah Brown made a bid for the U.S. Olympic team four months after delivering her daughter. (She didn’t make the team but still ran an impressive time of 4:24.97 in the fifteen hundred metres at the Olympic Trials.) She told me recently that she ran a ten-miler the day before her daughter was born. “There were definitely people who gave me second glances at the gym,” Brown said. “They said, ‘Are you sure you should do that?’ ” She continued, “I was amazed how during my pregnancy my body knew what to do. I kept thinking how women are strong, how we’re built to be able to have kids, but also be built to do so much more. It’s not that long ago that people thought a woman’s uterus would fall out if she ran too far.”
Dr. Raul Artal, an obstetrician-gynecologist who spent some of his early career in Southern California, not far from the tennis courts where Serena and Venus Williams were introduced to tennis, when they were preschool age, has been instrumental in reshaping the medical world’s attitudes about pregnancy and exercise. A generation ago, doctors were unlikely to recommend exercise for even a healthy pregnant woman. (Meanwhile, they would have thought little of a pregnant woman, or an athlete, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day; let’s not forget that Virginia Slims was a longtime sponsor of women’s tennis.) Artal recalls that, in the nineteen-eighties, the conventional wisdom among doctors was that women with diabetes should be hospitalized and placed on bed rest during their third trimester of pregnancy. “I thought it was completely unreal,” he told me recently. Concerned about the consequences of so much sedentary time, Artal conducted a study that placed pregnant patients with diabetes on stationary bicycles for fifteen minutes a day, and found that it helped to lower blood-sugar levels in both mother and baby. “We had to prove that exercise was good for pregnancy, just like it is in a non-pregnant state,” he said.
In the wake of Williams’s announcement, some have raised the possibility that being pregnant may actually have given the tennis player an advantage in Australia. The _New Scientist _cited research suggesting that because pregnancy can increase the volume of red blood cells, aiding the delivery of oxygen to muscles, women in the early stages of pregnancy may—debatably—experience a boost in athletic abilities.
Artal, who is the chairman emeritus of the department of obstetrics, gynecology, and women’s health at Saint Louis University, and a member of the International Olympic Committee group that studies pregnancy and exercise, told me that he’s heard stories of athletes in former Soviet countries who, during the Cold War heyday of sports, would intentionally get pregnant, hoping to capitalize on an increased count of red blood cells, and then abort the pregnancies after competing. “It was almost like a natural blood doping,” he said. The science on the athletic benefits of pregnancy is still sparse and inconclusive, and many of Williams's fans took offense at the implication that her pregnancy had any role in her winning another major title. (“Call me crazy, but I’m starting to think she’s just better than everyone else,” J. K. Rowling tweeted.)
Yet the commotion is a good thing. Williams’s pregnancy news reminded me of Linda Renfro, my aunt, who has been an avid amateur endurance athlete for decades. In September of 1985, she appeared pregnant on the cover of Runner’s World, clad in a loose sweatsuit and trotting on the beaches of the Pacific Northwest, flanked by my cousin Sarna. “Running while pregnant was a new phenomenon back in my day,” she told me recently, adding that when she was pregnant with the first of her four children, in 1976, she asked her obstetrician what she should do about running while pregnant. He replied that he had never been asked that before, but ultimately gave her good advice—to “listen to your body and use common sense.” She credits Janet Heinonen’s trailblazing tomes about women and running with offering some basic guidance on how to do so. “It was my neighbors who were most concerned,” she said.
The baby in my aunt’s belly, my cousin Tal, and I ran the Eugene Marathon together in 2013, and Sarna Renfro Becker, the little girl in the photo, went on to run on Stanford’s track team and have four kids of her own while continuing to train. In February, 2004, Sarna placed tenth at the U.S.A.T.F. Cross Country Championships, not yet knowing that she was two months pregnant with her second son, Logan. Shortly thereafter, she was randomly selected for the USADA’s out-of-competition drug testing. “They came to my house a couple of times, once while I was pregnant and once after Logan was born,” she told me. “I offered the testing woman breast milk in place of a urine sample, which she politely declined.”
