For years, Isha Sesay believed motherhood would happen naturally somewhere along the way. But as life unfolded, her career took centre stage, time kept moving, and she realised waiting any longer could mean giving up on having a child altogether.
The veteran Sierra Leonean broadcaster and former CNN International anchor Isha Sesay has shared why she chose to have a child through IVF on her own, saying she didn’t want to live with the regret of missing her chance to become a parent.
She said she had always imagined having children, but life didn’t unfold the way she expected. As the years passed, she realised waiting for everything to fall perfectly into place was becoming a risk she wasn’t willing to take.
Rather than keep hoping the timing would somehow work itself out, she decided to move forward alone.
Sesay said people sometimes assume her decision was a statement against men, but she insists it wasn’t. She described it instead as taking ownership of her own future and making peace with a choice that felt right for her.
Getting there wasn’t easy. Before welcoming her daughter in 2024, she endured several rounds of IVF, surgery to remove fibroids, hormone treatment and failed embryo transfers.
Another life changing experience was caring for her mother after she suffered a catastrophic stroke. Her mother remained in a semi-conscious state for almost nine years before dying in June 2025, a period Sesay says reshaped how she viewed time, family and the choices she still wanted to make.
She also credits those years with influencing her decision to step away from CNN after more than a decade with the network.
Sesay spoke about her journey during a recent conversation with Larry Madowo on “African Voices, where she said waiting for “the right man” could have meant running out of time to have the child she had always wanted.
She said:
“I had wanted to have a baby. It was always on the list of things that I was going to do. And then I got to CNN. And it just became about the work. Some people take it as though I did it as an affront or a rejection of men. It’s not a rejection of anyone. It is an embrace of my own autonomy.
Not having a child would be the greatest regret of my life. And with my biological clock ticking down, if I was waiting for the right man to come along before I did it, well, I might find myself out of time.”
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