Eboni K. Williams is pregnant!
PEOPLE can exclusively reveal that the Real Housewives of New York City alumna and Equal Justice with Judge Eboni K. Williams star, 40, is pregnant with her first baby — a girl, due Aug. 16.
The happy news comes two years after Williams revealed she was using her frozen eggs to pursue motherhood via sperm donation and in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“Anybody who’s gone through IVF or attempted IVF will tell you so many things have to go right for the final result of this journey to be a baby,” Williams says. “That’s why I’ve called this ‘my remarkable miracle,’ because it really does feel like I’ve been the recipient of some very enormous favor from God above.”
Williams also says she’s nicknamed her daughter “one-of-one,” a moniker that doesn’t just signify how special the baby-to-be is to her, but also represents the luck she had to make her dreams of getting pregnant into a reality.
“I did one egg retrieval at 34 years old, not really having a clear intention on if I would use those eggs or when I would use the eggs. And six years later, that one egg retrieval led to one genetically normal embryo which led to one successful embryo transfer and — one pregnancy later — I’ll soon have, God willing, one beautifully healthy baby girl. So it really does feel like fate.”
Motherhood wasn’t something that was always on Williams’ Bingo card, she admits to PEOPLE.
“I want to say that with conviction and clarity; I was not the little girl that grew up fantasizing about having kids and what I would name them and all of that,” she says. “That was not my dream or fantasy. I had no real expectation around it.”
Even when she went through the process of freezing her eggs, Williams didn’t have “a surefire plan” of what was next. “I was really thinking I would never use them, whether I got married again or didn’t,” she shares. “It was the pandemic and having some real existential conversations within my own self about legacy and life and love and the different ways in which I really wanted to explore family.”
During that exploration, Williams says it finally clicked to her that she didn’t have to pigeonhole herself into the boundaries of a traditional motherhood. “I really freed myself of the rigidness of what legacy, love, and family could look like,” she reflects. “Those are the three pillars I reassessed, and it helped shake me from this idea of, ‘I have to have it this way on this timeline everyone else is following.'”
The timeline Williams was on looked different. After making her debut in 2021 on RHONY season 13 as the show’s first-ever Black Housewife, the lawyer and former public defender put out her second book — Bet on Black: The Good News about Being Black in America Today — and returned to her broadcast journalism roots as the host of The Grio News with Eboni K. Williams and the news podcast Holding Court with Eboni K. Williams, the latter which earned an NAACP Image Award in March.
She’s also the presiding judge on the first-run syndicated daytime court show Equal Justice with Judge Eboni K. Williams, which debuted in September 2023.
That professional success, for which Williams says she is “incredibly fortunate,” mixed with the fact that she had purchased property for herself in Manhattan during the pandemic helped give her confidence that the time was right to start her motherhood journey.
“I had realized this aspect of the American dream for myself, and I felt like I could really provide for a child in a way that feels stable and safe and secure” she shares. “It just started getting crystallized for me that I was not only going to be all right just in my own individual state but also that God was blessing me with a tremendous abundance of love and resources. So I felt compelled to share this forward to the next generation — not just through mentorship, but through creating my own progeny and cementing my own legacy in this very unique way that only motherhood could offer.”
It also helped that Williams had learned to get rid of the “shoulds” in life.
“There will always be that voice that says, ‘Maybe I should have waited to meet a man and remarry before I had a baby? Maybe I should not be trying to do this alone.’ But f— that!” she says. “I’m not waiting. I’m 40 years old. I’m not waiting to build assets. I’m not waiting to build my career. I’m not waiting to travel. And I’m certainly not waiting to start a family.”
“I just refuse to wait one more day, that’s where I’m at,” Williams continues. “Everything I want to do, I’m doing right now. And I’m excited. I feel as ready as I’m ever going to be.”
For more on Eboni K. Williams, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.
via: People
