Country Singer Brooke Eden and Wife Hilary Hoover Expecting Baby

Country artist Brooke Eden and her wife Hilary Hoover are expecting. “We were in our kitchen and just held each other and cried for 10 minutes,” Eden, 35, told People about learning her wife was pregnant. “I looked at the [pregnancy test] about 100 times, and then of course we were waiting to confirm it 100% with the doctor. And when we got that news, we were both so elated and just the happiest ever.”

“And pleasantly surprised,” added Hoover, 34. “We’re just on the other side of the first trimester, sliding into [the] second [trimester] right now. I had a rough few weeks, but other than that, I’m feeling great.” Hoover’s due date is Nov. 7. 

The Nashville couple, who married in 2022, always knew they would someday have children. “The very first day that I met [Hilary], I told her she was meant to be a mom,” recalls Eden, who first met Hoover in 2015. “[Hilary] just had such the most natural maternal instinct. We’ve known from the very beginning that we wanted to start a family together. It’s always just been a matter of when and how.”

It wasn’t until February 2023 that the couple started taking appointments with Dr. Abby Eblen at Nashville Fertility Center that their options became more apparent.”There’s a lot of decisions to be made when it comes to having a baby as a gay couple,” explained Hoover. “We actually talked a lot over the years about the different options between in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and adoption, and we’ve gone down both routes several times. We ended up deciding that we would try to get pregnant with either one of our embryos first.”

As a result, Hoover and Eden underwent the arduous egg retrieval process last year. “We definitely knew we wanted to use an anonymous sperm donor from a sperm bank,” continued Hoover. “And then, we both wanted to try an egg retrieval, and basically if we got a few embryos out of that, then we were going to try to get me pregnant. I’ve always wanted to carry a baby. Brooke never cared as much about being pregnant. So, believe it or not, that part of the discussion was easy. It just has always been known between the two of us that I would carry our babies.”

Nevertheless, Eden has a maternal side to her as well. “Ever since I was little, I’ve known I wanted to be a mom, but I always thought I would adopt because I never thought I would get married,” the singer said. “I always thought I would be a single mom with an adopted baby. Then I met [Hilary] and it was just like, ‘Wait a second. I get to fall in love with my surrogate. She gets to be my wife and carry my baby.’”

However, neither of them anticipated that Hoover would become pregnant so soon. “We did our first transfer in the middle of February, and that’s the one that we’re lucky to say worked,” Hoover said. “It was very weird, but within an hour or two of the transfer, I was like, ‘I’ve never been pregnant, but I think this is what it would feel like if I was pregnant.’” In fact, she turned out to be pregnant. 

With their first baby on the way this fall, Eden and Hoover say that Mother’s Day will now hold a different meaning for them both. “It did hit me pretty hard when I thought about this year’s Mother’s Day and it technically being our first with a baby on the way, and then next year we’ll have a baby in our arms,” Hoover says. “There’s definitely this kind of wide-eyed moment when that happens, especially as a gay person.”

These days, the couple say they have already begun thinking about expanding their little small family even further. “We have several other embryos frozen on ice, so we hopefully are done with the egg retrieval portion of it,” concludes Hoover. “Hopefully we have enough embryos frozen that we can have all our future babies just from transfers. I don’t mean to sound cheesy, but we’ve just totally been soaking each other in and taking care of each other since we found out we were pregnant. I feel like it’s brought us so much closer.”