Tennis icon Serena Williams has welcomed her second child, a baby girl, her husband announced on social media.
“Welcome, Adira River Ohanian,” Williams’ husband Alexis Ohanian shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday afternoon.
“I’m grateful to report our house is teaming with love: a happy & healthy newborn girl and happy & healthy mama. Feeling grateful,” he added.
He praised his wife, 41, saying, “you’ve now given me another incomparable gift — you’re the GMOAT” meaning “Greatest mother of all time.”
He shared photos of Williams beaming holding her newborn with Ohanian and their 5-year-old daughter Olympia.
“Thanks to all the amazing medical staff who took care of my wife & our daughter I’ll never forget the moment I introduced @olympiaohanian to her baby sister,” he wrote.
He concluded with a Bible verse that read: “Your peace would have been like a river, your well-being like the waves of the sea.”
The decorated tennis star announced in a Vogue essay last August that she was planning to retire from tennis and focus on growing her family.
“I have never liked the word retirement,” Williams wrote. “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to is evolution.”
“These days, if I have to choose between building my tennis résumé and building my family, I choose the latter,” she added.
Williams was also vocal about her health challenges after giving birth to her daughter Olympia in 2017.
In an essay for Elle she detailed how the day after she delivered Olympia by C-section, her legs were numb and she feared she was having a pulmonary embolism — a threatening blood clot in the lungs.
In the essay, she said that she learned in 2010 she had blood clots in her lungs, and “ever since then, I’ve lived in fear of them returning. It wasn’t a one-off; I’m at high risk for blood clots.”
She alerted hospital staff but said, “No one was really listening to what I was saying.”
After much persistence, she wrote, a nurse called Williams’ doctor who agreed to have things checked out and she was found to have several blood clots and needed several surgeries.
Williams noted how in the U.S., Black people are nearly three times more likely to die during or after childbirth than those who are white.
“Many of these deaths are considered by experts to be preventable,” Williams wrote. “Being heard and appropriately treated was the difference between life or death for me; I know those statistics would be different if the medical establishment listened to every Black woman’s experience.”
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