“Now that my baby bump is showing, the amount of people that look at the chair, look at the bump, look back at the chair, the bump…” She trails off. “These two realities can coexist.”
Mallory Weggemann is no stranger to drawing double takes. Some can immediately put a face to the name—hey, that’s Mallory, the Paralympic gold medalist!—others know she’s someone of note but just can’t quite place it, and the remainder stare simply because they’re not used to the sight of a wheelchair-bound pregnant woman.
But that’s the least of Weggemann’s concerns. What matters most these days is that her pregnancy was termed viable after a years-long infertility journey. She and husband, Jay Snyder, who live in Eagan, have been very public about their IVF experience, documenting the dizzying highs and crushing lows through her Instagram feed.
“My husband has been so courageous to talk about the fact that it’s been male factor infertility, and so the infertility challenges lie on his side, which, society naturally thinks infertility is a ‘women’s health issue,’’’ she says, “and then when you are an individual with a disability, society naturally assumes, oh, she’s disabled, she can’t have kids. When actually, the two don’t go hand in hand.”
After years of being in the spotlight—whether it’s via motivational speaking engagements, commentating for NBC Sports, making waves with record-setting times at the U.S. Paralympics swimming team, or doing book tours to promote her 2021 book, Limitless: The Power of Hope and Resilience to Overcome—Weggemann decided that talking openly about IVF “in real time” would help reduce the stigma and shame associated with it. She’s had plenty of practice showing people that multiple truths can be held at once, so why would this part of her life be any different?
“We own a business together—it’s a family business, the two of us—a social impact agency and production studio, and that makes us storytellers,” she says. “We know the power that stories have to transcend and connect and empower and impact people. And literally bringing our little one in on this journey has been so special.” It’s a beautiful new chapter to Weggemann’s life story, a mosaic of triumphs and tragedies and the gray space that exists in between.
Training for Motherhood
On January 21, 2008, Weggemann, a former high school swimmer, went in for a medical procedure to treat post-shingles back pain, and left without sensation or movement from the waist down. The next six weeks were spent with physical therapists, trying to help her accept and adapt to a reality in which running, walking, or standing could only be a distant memory. “I spent every day online trying to figure out what it all meant,” she told People last year. “I couldn’t look and see people that looked like me, showing me what a path forward could look like.”
While she experienced some really dark times (“I felt confusion, frustration, fear, pretty much any emotion you can imagine”), Wegemann slowly recalibrated her mindset to try and do—or at the very least, embrace—the things she had once loved. “There was still so much life to live.” Four months after that fateful day, she got back in the water and never looked back. She went on to shatter records at the IPC Swimming World Championships in 2009 and 2010, and then took home the gold in the women’s 50-meter freestyle at the 2012 London Paralympics.
“I’ve been a swimmer since I was 7, I was injured at 18, I came back into the sport, and now here I am, a three-time Paralympian and five-time medalist,” she says. “And I think when you pair all of that together, [it shows] this element of adaptability.” Facing some pretty significant adversities in her life with an odds-defying attitude is the feather in Weggemann’s cap that will, no doubt, help prime her physically and mentally for motherhood. Another stage of life that’s paved with unknowns, even for the most privileged or able-bodied among us.
“I’ve learned how to literally reinvent the wheel to get through the day. What’s going to make me great tomorrow isn’t the very thing I did five years ago,” she says. “I have to constantly adapt, reinvent, and find ways of being and doing.” The world of athletics, she says, has taught her there is no one way of simply being. “How I get to the top of a Paralympic podium versus how my competitor finds their way there are two very different equations. And guess what? We’re both really kick-ass athletes.”
Label-less and Limitless
Pregnancy is an unpredictable marathon, marked with joy and tenacity. But it’s not all warm fuzzies—sometimes it’s rife with unsolicited advice, conflicting information from different sources, and stigmas that just won’t fizzle out. For Weggemann, singling out her voice in a sea of noise has become its own herculean task.“The world of parenting by nature is still wholly inaccessible to the disability community. It’s perception-based—I can’t tell you how many times in the past 15 years people have said to me: What kind of mom could you be? Is that fair to your [future] kids? I’m talking complete and utter strangers, face to face,” she says. A perception, she adds, that’s been ingrained in people’s minds due to a lack of representation. “Anything that challenges our version of ‘normal,’ we deem as not okay.”
Weggemann is only one of 200 (-ish) women with spinal cord injuries who will give birth this year. Those packed shelves of parenthood books you see at Barnes + Noble contain very little useful information that applies to situations like hers. “I can’t go to a birthing class, I can’t [consult in] highly-talked about parenthood books, because 90 percent of the content doesn’t apply to me,” she says.
“I can’t tell you how many times in the past 15 years people have said to me: What kind of mom could you be? Is that fair to your [future] kids? I’m talking complete strangers, face to face.”
After her injury, she was met with a lot of comments and “frankly, just, downright ableism from society.” She had to find a way to separate the ignorance and unconscious bias of others from fact, learning—sometimes the hard way—that other people’s opinions and stereotypes were simply not hers to carry. Motherhood is already a target for uninvited comments; when you’re not used to letting people down gently or diverting the conversation, it can add to the strains, something Weggemann knows a thing or two about.
When it comes to motherhood, “I’m really careful about who I talk to, I’m careful about whose advice I seek, because those little comments that seem completely innocent to others are micro-aggressions,” she says. A takeaway for all moms-to-be, she says, is to consider the source. “Be very aware of who you’re leaning on for support—what is the influence and impact they have on you, and how do they make you feel?”
A Racing Certainty
Weggemann competed in the 2022 U.S. Paralympics Swimming National Championships in December, finishing second overall in the 50 fly, and qualified for finals in the 50 free and the 200 IM [individual medley]. She also has her eyes on the 2024 Paralympic Games. “When I made the national team in 2009, I had just turned 20 the week before and I never in a million years thought my professional career would carry all the way through motherhood,” she says. “To be able to get behind those starting blocks, 13 years later as a national team athlete while 26 weeks pregnant?”
“It shows what women are capable of, it shows what women with disabilities are capable of—it’s this place where we get to truly showcase what’s possible and, hopefully, start chipping away at those narratives and perceptions that we carry in society.”