When Serena Williams was preparing for the birth of her second daughter, she focused on mental preparation. In an interview with *Glamour*, the tennis star, 43, shared her decision to have a cesarean section for her daughter, Adira, now 13 months old.
Although she doesn’t regret avoiding natural childbirth, Williams admitted feeling a bit sad about missing that experience again.
Reflecting on natural birth, she said, “Looking back, I’ll never have that moment again. For whatever weird reason, that kind of makes me a little sad, but that’s probably a party of one.”
“This time, I had a plan. I like to say I put my best effort out there, and this was no different,” she said about welcoming Adira. “I literally approached it like a Grand Slam: ‘How can I succeed?’”
Williams, who shares daughters Adira, 1, and Olympia, 6, with her husband Alexis Ohanian, recently celebrated Adira’s first birthday in August.
On Instagram, she expressed her love for both daughters, sharing throwback maternity photos where she and Olympia wore matching pink dresses while smiling in a bed of flowers.
“Olympia is always there for me,” Williams wrote in her caption. “Before having a second child, I always wondered, ‘How could I love anything as much as I love @olympiaohanian?’”
She continued, “Then Adira came along … she is so special, so fun, so funny, so loving, so sweet, and so strong! God makes your heart bigger. My love for Olympia hasn’t dimmed; my heart has just doubled in size, giving me the ability to love even more!”
In 2018, Williams shared in a *CNN* article that she had experienced life-threatening complications after Olympia’s birth, stating she “almost died” six days postpartum.
“It started with a pulmonary embolism, where one or more arteries in the lungs are blocked by a blood clot. Given my medical history with this, I’m always fearful. So, when I struggled to breathe, I alerted the nurses right away.
“That led to a series of complications that I’m lucky to have survived. First, my C-section wound opened due to the intense coughing from the embolism. I went back into surgery, where the doctors found a large hematoma—clotted blood—in my abdomen. Then I had another procedure to prevent clots from reaching my lungs. When I finally got home, I had to spend the first six weeks of motherhood in bed.”
