The former soccer star opens up about the hardships of suffering from a miscarriage.
There's a lot more to Hope Solo than you know.
The 37-year-old former soccer star is opening up about her struggles with fertility and how she was "hours from dying" when she got pregnant and then miscarried. In a new interview with Elle magazine published on Tuesday, Hope shares how she and her husband, Jerramy Stevens, had been trying to get pregnant for a long time. She then suffered the loss when she was running for president of the United States Soccer Federation.
A week later, she was still in pain when she went to the doctor and learned she had been pregnant with twins and that one was ectopic.
"The doctor said I was hours from dying," she recalls. "They ended up having to remove my fallopian tube." Since then she has begun in vitro fertilization and hopes to still have a family.
Just days after, however, she was in Orlando for the USSF election, where she gave a passionate speech about the importance of equal pay and working conditions for male and female players. "A vote for [the establishment candidates] is a vote for the status quo: disunity, discord and more failure," she said during her campaign speech.
"That speech took a lot," she explains. "Even before all that, it would have taken courage."
"I didn’t expect to win. But I knew my voice was important," she adds.
Now, working on a slew of projects, Solo says that while she does miss the intensity of goalkeeping, she thinks she "needed this sense of peace." Back in 2016, the Seattle Reign FC of the National Women's Soccer League announced the athlete was "granted a personal leave." The news came days after she was suspended for six months from the U.S. Soccer organization for conduct that they said was "counter to the organization's principles."
"So much of what we do can be catastrophic if we make mistakes," Solo reflects.
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