Bachelor’s Colton Underwood Says He Had ‘Shame’ Over Fertility Struggles

Bachelor alum Colton Underwood is opening up about his fertility struggles as he and husband Jordan Brown continue their journey to parenthood.

“It is hard, and it’s so intimate. I had so much shame around it. I felt inferior,” Underwood, 32, shared in a Friday, February 16, interview with Parents magazine. “My ego took a hit, because I pride myself on being a healthy athlete. All of a sudden, you can’t do the one thing that you really want to do and produce sperm.”

Underwood came out as gay in 2021, just months before he and Brown confirmed their romance. They decided to expand their family before their May 2023 wedding, and Underwood noted that their mutual desire to become parents was one thing that bonded them as a couple.

“That was especially important because, as I’ve been on my coming out journey, [wanting to be a dad] was one of the factors that kept me in the closet,” he said. “I didn’t really know it was possible to build a family as a gay man, until I came out, until I started having more conversations with Jordan and started educating myself.”

The pair started out in high spirits before things quickly became more complicated.

“When we first went in [to the fertility clinic], we went in sort of skipping, holding hands, all happy,” he told the outlet. “Day one of starting our family … I got my sperm results back, and I had four sperm. Three of them were dead. One was barely moving in my sample. It was one of those things where [I was] considered technically infertile. I was like, ‘This sucks. This is hard.’”

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He continued, “There’s so many different things that people don’t really understand that are contributing factors to low quality and motility in sperm. And I was basically doing everything I possibly could to kill my sperm, and I didn’t even know.”

Underwood noted that he wasn’t prepared for how difficult receiving the news would be. “It’s really emotional in many different ways that we never really thought,” he said.

Discovering his fertility struggles is what ultimately sparked Underwood’s desire to launch his upcoming podcast, “Daddyhood,” which will premiere on Wednesday, February 21. The show will tackle the more difficult aspects of the journey toward parenthood including surrogacy, egg donors and adoption. The podcast is in partnership with Family Equality, a non-profit that works to ensure LGBTQIA+ parents have the proper resources and tools for building a family.

For Underwood, the podcast has been a “therapeutic” outlet. “I think that often gets swept under the rug, the human element,” he said. ”I know a lot of women get told, ‘Your chances of carrying to term are X percentage,’ and then, you start feeling like a number, and you start getting discouraged. My goal here is just to humanize it.”

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Underwood was an NFL star before joining Bachelor Nation in 2018 for season 14 of The Bachelorette. After leaving the show single, he later appeared on Bachelor in Paradise in 2018 before starring as season 23’s Bachelor, where he sparked a romance with Cassie Randolph. The pair opted to date instead of getting engaged before calling it quits for good in May 2020. One year later, Underwood came out during an episode of Good Morning America.

“This year’s been a lot for a lot of people and it’s probably made a lot of people look at themselves in the year and figure out who they are,” he shared at the time. “I’ve ran from myself for a long time, I’ve hated myself for a long time. I’m gay. I came to terms with that earlier this year, and the next step in all of this was sort of letting people know. … I’m the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been in my life. That means the world to me.”

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Later that year, Underwood gushed over his relationship with Brown. “I’m happy, I’m in love and I’m in a good position,” he exclusively told Us Weekly at the time. “What was so cool too was, like, after [Bachelor] was over, I didn’t know what was really next. I knew that I was still coming out and I still am. So there’s still things to work through right now. … The friends I have, the support group that I have has been so helpful and impactful.”

Ahead of his wedding to Brown, Underwood got candid about his desire to become a dad.

“I feel like I was born a dad,” he told Us in March 2022. “There’s nothing more in this world than I want than to raise kids. I’m really excited for when that time comes.”