Pregnant Wife of Lady Antebellum Member Details Fertility Struggle
— -- As part of the chart-topping Lady Antebellum, Charles Kelley has helped take the music industry by storm.
Now, Kelley, 33, has another reason to sing. He and his wife, 32-year-old Cassie McConnell Kelley, are expecting a baby after six years of marriage.
McConnell Kelley talked to ABC News about her pregnancy.
“We're almost four months and I'm due in February and we just found out that we're having a boy, which I just get choked up thinking about and we're thankful, we're so -- blessed isn't a strong enough word … We were up against some incredible odds and it still happened,” she said.
McConnell Kelley initially shared in news earlier this month in a post on her website, Womanista.com.
In the Wednesday interview with ABC, McConnell Kelley detailed a two-year struggle to get pregnant.
“When you're young and healthy and you're ready to start a family you just don't envision there will be any problems doing that,” she said.
The couple went through months of negative pregnancy tests before visiting a fertility specialist in November.
“From that we learned that my body doesn't ovulate regularly which is problem number one, and also I had a blockage in my Fallopian tube which also happened to be connected to my dominant ovary...,” she said. “Our doctor, when all was said and done, she told us we had a one percent chance of conceiving a child naturally without doing IVF.”
IVF, or in vitro fertilization, refers to the process of combining an egg and sperm outside of the body and then placing any resulting embryo into the uterus for further development.
McConnell Kelley suffers from anovulation, a condition in which a woman doesn’t produce an egg every month.
“Cassie, just like a lot of women, has more than one problem …,” her doctor, Abby Eblen, said. “Typically women ovulate every other month on every other side and so she would always have essentially six times to get pregnant rather than 12 times to get pregnant with a blocked Fallopian tube.”
The Kelleys had planned to start IVF, but then, McConnell Kelley said she and her husband were surprised and excited to find out she was pregnant.
An estimated 6 million women in the United States struggle with infertility, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Eblen said McConnell Kelley’s story had an important lesson.
“I think the most important thing to do take away from Cassie's story is that hope is always alive … for a lot of women, we get pleasantly surprised and a lot of women are ultimately successful if they continue to strive to get pregnant and to pursue treatment,” Eblen said.
