Former Olympic champion and figure skater Tara Lipinski is expecting a baby after a long and heartbreaking journey to conceiving.
On Episode 13 of her vodcast, Tara Lipinski: Out of the Blue, the 41-year-old Olympic champion and her husband Todd Kapostasi announced they were expecting their first child via a surrogate.
“It was really hard to believe that anything would change after doing the same thing over and over again for four years,” Lipinski said on the latest episode of Out of the Blue as she waited to find out if her surrogate was pregnant during heartbeat scan.
Lipinski said the trauma of so many failed heartbeat scans forced her to shield herself from the disappointing news. She said she relied on the support of her surrogate mother, Mikayla, to prepare. Her surrogate mother received her heart scan results while in a different state than the skater and her husband.
“Mikayla and I had a plan, and the plan was that she wasn’t going to FaceTime me or call me before the actual heartbeat happened because my heart just couldn’t take it,” Lipinski recalled on the podcast. . “I didn’t want to be on the phone while she was getting ready or coming into the room, or while I was going through the initial part of the scan. As if I didn’t care. I didn’t want to know about it. I just wanted to know if there was a heartbeat.”
“So I told her to do it if I had a heartbeat to contact me on FaceTime. And if there is no heartbeat, just call us,” Lipinski explained, before revealing that she received a FaceTime call.
The couple went on to recall their different reactions to the good news. As Lipinski burst into tears, Kapostasi says he took a victory lap around the kitchen.
“I felt like the sun had finally set on our terrible fertility journey,” Kapostasi said of the news on the podcast.
Despite the happy news, Lipinski says the setbacks along her pregnancy journey have changed her perspective on how she’ll feel when she finally finds out she’s expecting.
“If I was honest with myself, maybe after my second miscarriage… I probably knew I would never be able to really enjoy it like I always dreamed,” she explained.
Lipinski and Kapostasi detailed their five-year struggle with fertility in a podcast that debuted in August of this year. Throughout the series, they spoke candidly about four miscarriages, dilation and curettage procedures (a procedure to remove tissue from inside the uterus, sometimes used to treat conditions such as incomplete miscarriage), an endometriosis diagnosis, and two surgeries.
“Tara Lipinski: Out of the Blue” is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music. Video episodes are also available to watch on YouTube.
At the beginning of her latest episode, Lipinski shared that she began talking about her infertility on the podcast in an attempt to directly address the taboo topic. This opinion puts her in the ranks of public women who have also spoken openly about turning to surrogacy after feeling they had run out of options.
Earlier this year in June, Chrissy Teigen announced on Instagram that she and her husband John Legend had welcomed a son via surrogacy after losing their son in 2021.
In July 2023, actor Rebel Wilson spoke to TODAY.com about the decision to have a surrogate carry her child.
“Having only one embryo, I decided to go through surrogacy,” Wilson explained. “Physically, I could carry a child, but the statistical chance of it working with a surrogate mother was much higher.”
Her daughter Royce was born in August 2022.
Actor and journalist Maria Menounos said she gave birth to a girl through surrogacy after a 10-year struggle with infertility.
“One of the greatest gifts was that I had friends who had gone through (the surrogacy process), like Kim Kardashian, who helped me through it,” Menounos told TODAY.com in a September 2023 interview about how to become a mother. “I asked her, ‘Should I be worried about this?’ Should I micromanage this? and she was so cool about everything with her surrogates that she allowed me to not feel like I had to be in control. That’s the message I want to spread as well.”