Former Pretty Little Liars actress Lucy Hale is opening up about her decision to freeze her eggs.
“I haven’t spoken about this, and I did this about exactly a year ago,” Hale, 37, said on the Monday, September 21, episode of the “On Purpose With Jay Shetty” podcast. “At the time, I was not in a relationship. I did it all by myself, like a big girl.”
She continued, “I thought about it for a couple of years. I didn’t talk to many people about it, only because I only knew a few people who had gone through the experience. You know, everyone has their own experience. I heard great experiences, I heard really bad ones, and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to do the thing, go to my doctor, take the shots and just be prepared for anything.’”
For Hale, undergoing the procedure felt “the most empowering in the world.”
“I think that is a decision that I made just for insurance because who knows?” she explained. “I might want to have kids in my 40s. I think everything as humans, medicine [and] everything has evolved so much that it would perfectly be OK for me to have a child way later in life. I just don’t know yet.”
Hale decided to freeze her eggs after realizing her future motherhood hopes.
“I have gone through so many iterations of that and my idea of that,” she said of her dreams of becoming a parent. “For much of my life, I did not want kids, but it was only because I didn’t think I would ever be OK enough to have kids. Then my sister had kids, and I was just like, ‘Wow, she’s such a good mom.’”
She added, “I have to come to realize that I have a mothering, nurturing quality about me that I would love to explore when the time is right. I see versions of my life where I do have kids [and] I see versions of my life where I don’t. I truly don’t know where life is taking me, but the good news is I don’t have to worry ‘cause I’m always going to land where I’m supposed to be.”
While planning for the future, Hale has still tried to not focus too much on her dreams in place of what’s right in front of her.
“Sometimes I live too much in the future and I’m too specific,” she acknowledged. “It’s like, ‘Well, maybe that’s not the path that I’m supposed to be on.’ I think it’s important to dream , to have goals, to have wants, but I think … the more present you are, with your feet on the ground, you can see all the options and go, ‘Ding, that’s the one that I want.’”
