Erin Andrews welcomes baby after years-long infertility struggle
Erin Andrews is a mom.
ABC News can confirm that the sportscaster and her husband, former NHL player Jarrett Stoll, recently welcomed their first child, a baby boy, via surrogate, following a years-long experience with infertility, which Andrews shared publicly.
In January, Andrews, 45, described her struggle with infertility as "one of the most challenging things" in her life, telling Us Weekly, "It's not easy."
Previously, in August 2021, Andrews penned a personal essay in which she publicly shared for the first time that she was undergoing in-vitro fertilization. At the time, she said she was on her seventh round of IVF.
In the IVF process, eggs are removed from a woman's ovaries during egg retrieval and fertilized in a petri dish, where the fertilized egg cell begins to divide. The resulting embryo or embryos are eventually transferred back into the uterus to hopefully grow to a full-term pregnancy and live birth.
"This is my 7th one, and I've been going through these treatments since I was 35 years old," she wrote. "I'm now 43, so my body is kind of stacked against me."
"It's a ton of money, it's a ton of time, it's a ton of mental and physical anguish. And more times than not, they're unsuccessful," she wrote of the IVF treatments. "I think that's why a lot of people choose to be quiet about it."
Around the world, nearly 1 in 6 people are affected by infertility in their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization.
Andrews is also a cervical cancer survivor. She was diagnosed in 2016 and underwent surgery, but did not require a hysterectomy, she told "Good Morning America" in 2018.
"I didn't have to have a hysterectomy and so I'm fully capable of having a baby," Andrews said. "But that is because I went and got tested and because we were able to treat it early, and that is all you need to tell the women in your life."
