At 37, A Breakup Led Kellee Stewart To Freeze Her Eggs—Now She’s Helping Women Own Their Fertility Journey

When Kellee Stewart decided to freeze her eggs at age 37, the deck appeared stacked against her. She was freshly out of a seven-year relationship that stalled before marriage. Stewart also worried that because of her age and relationship status, motherhood was out of the cards entirely.

“When we broke up, I realized I was not only newly single in my late 30s, but I had given my best baby-making years to the wrong man. I unknowingly gave him my biology,” the All American actress, now 49, tells Refinery 29 Unbothered.

Stewart’s concerns were warranted. A 2022 NYU Langone Fertility Center study noted the optimal age for egg freezing as 35 or younger. With the proverbial clock ticking, Stewart took swift steps to give herself the best chance at motherhood on her own terms.

“[My ex and I] ended things on a Sunday and by Wednesday, I was laying on a table with a fertility specialist in the gap of my thighs. ‘Are there any follicles?’ I asked [my fertility specialist]. Did I wait too long?”

Gratefully, Stewart learned that she was still a good candidate. After one cycle, her fertility specialist retrieved 32 eggs; 29 were viable and successfully frozen. Through this experience, Stewart also discovered her passion to help others on an alternative path to building their families. “I became an advocate to not only educate women about proactively protecting their fertility, but to bring to light that we have more to lose when staying in a relationship past its expiration date.”

Like many other Black women in America, Stewart is also concerned about Donald Trump’s second presidency and what that could mean for access to reproductive choices, including abortion. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to leave abortion access up to individual states. Yet the federal government plays a sizable role in shaping reproductive health policies, including regulating access to the abortion pill and allocating federal public health funding, as CNN reports. 

Abortion rights advocates also fear Trump’s administration may try to erode President Biden-era policies aimed at increasing abortion access and impede socially liberal states efforts to respond to The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, a 1973 case making abortion a constitutional right.

“As an advocate, I know we have to keep fighting,” Stewart says, recalling SCOTUS’ 2022 overturning of the landmark abortion rights case. “But as a Black woman of childbearing age, I am very, very scared.”

In the ruling’s wake, individual states have enacted restrictions or complete abortion bans. Currently, abortion is illegal in 13 U.S. states, according to the Centers for Reproductive Rights, with Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee among those leveraging civil or criminal penalties.

In practice, abortion bans could disproportionately affect Black women. According to an April 2024 report by The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. Worse yet, the CDC determined that risk factors include “variation in quality healthcare, underlying chronic conditions, structural racism, and implicit bias,” all of which should be concerning to anyone living in an abortion-banning state.

“Because reproductive freedom did not win in the presidential election of 2024, people have to become extremely educated about how their body works.” Stewart adds, “They have to find communities and safe places to carry pregnancies. They have to find the doctors who will educate them and keep their safety as a top priority, which most doctors do.” 

Gratefully, Stewart can look to her own 81-year-old mother, who marched for civil rights amid Jim Crow-Era segregation, for much-needed guidance on the path forward. “Without hesitation, she said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you don’t do. You don’t yield to hate. You don’t yield to a mentality of, ‘This is the worst thing that could ever happen.’ You don’t yield to fear. You have to rise above it,” Stewart recalls.

“And I’m talking to a woman who was part of the marches that went to West Virginia State College. I remember her and my dad both telling me stories about when they would organize at colleges, and they would go through these peer groups that would practice for when the police came or when someone called them the N-word or told them to go back to Africa.” 

She continues, “They had to be still and steadfast and focused. And when you go through such a time as this, where we see this election go in a direction that none of us wanted for this country, especially those of us whose back this country was built on, you have to look to your elders for advice.”

A fertility advocate for the past four years, Stewart first went viral in 2020 after posting a passionate Instagram Story responding to an episode of Married to Medicine, where an OB-GYN advised a patient against freezing her eggs after age 35.

The response was overwhelming.

“My DMs blew up with hundreds in one night. I’m at over 500 DMs from women asking me questions about egg freezing and what the process was, how much does it cost, ‘I have fibroids, can I still freeze my eggs?’ ‘I have endometriosis. Can I still freeze my eggs?’ And that’s really where I understood that I was definitely reaching more than a dozen people and that there were definitely a lot of uninformed women just like me.”

It was clear that many women, especially Black women, were facing similar challenges and seeking information about fertility preservation. According to the National Institute of Health, studies suggest that up to 80% of Black women may develop fibroids by the age of 50, compared to around 70% of white women. Black women also tend to experience more severe symptoms and complications from fibroids, including heavier bleeding, pelvic pain, and infertility.

Unfortunately, Black women are often underrepresented in studies on PCOS due to factors such as misdiagnosis and limited data. However, it is suggested that PCOS is much more prevalent in Black women compared to other racial and ethnic groups and leads to significant health issues such as irregular periods, infertility, weight gain, and increased health risks.

Around the same time, Stewart’s comments went viral; she also wrote a feature-length film, 29 Eggs, inspired by the number of eggs she froze and her unconventional journey to motherhood. “It was a way for me to just kind of keep talking about this thing that was percolating because I was an actor and a writer first.”

When the pandemic hit, production on the film shut down. Instead of leaving the proverbial table, Stewart used her social platform to create and host Warrior Wednesdays, an interactive Instagram Live show dedicated to supporting individuals experiencing infertility. She invites medical experts, fellow advocates, and patients, “specifically of color—Black women and Black men—because we don’t get the national platform in these conversations.”

Her sentiments echo the opinions of many, as a recent Pew Research Center study stated that Black Americans are often misrepresented or overlooked in news media. Stewart calls the fertility support network the most resilient group of people she knows.

“There’s a phrase that we use: worst group, best members. It’s because it’s the worst group you want to be in. You don’t want to be in a situation where your ability to build a family is threatened because your body is ‘failing’ you, but it’s the best members because of the support of people who have been through it and found alternate ways to build their family.”

Stewart has used her advocacy to destigmatize the infertility journey, including working alongside the National Infertility Association and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. In addition, she co-created Parenthood Journey Invitations with Evite, a line tailored for alternative family planning such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF), egg freezing, and rainbow baby showers. She also wants to change the often punitive narrative around abortions.

“There is a deep misunderstanding of the nuances underneath the word abortion, and most people equate it to the termination of an unwanted pregnancy, but they don’t know all of the medical procedures [covered under abortion care],” she says, adding that abortion care can often be necessary to prevent potentially fatal complications such as sepsis following a miscarriage.

Unfortunately, sepsis claims the lives of countless mothers each year, not just in the United States but in the world, making it one of the leading causes of maternal, neonatal, and child mortality.

 “So we have now reached a time in this country where there is a target on the backs of any woman of childbearing age. We have to respond to it even more vigorously now,” she says.

What started as a journey to extend the rapidly ticking clock for herself has blossomed into an opportunity to show other women—especially Black women—that even as life circumstances change, we can adapt at any age. Despite an uncertain four years ahead, Stewart still sees motherhood in her future and will continue to share resources with others whose journey goes against stereotypical values.

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This article was originally published on refinery29.com.