Feature images of Da Brat, who is pregnant, with her wife Jesseca Harris-Dupart, via Da Brat’s Instagram. Taken by Artez La’Mon Noel

Da Brat is pregnant! The rapper and her wife, Jesseca “Judy” Harris-Dupart, announced today that their family is growing by one more!! Harris-Dupart is also a mother of three prior to their relationship, and this will be the couple’s first child together. “I just thought it wasn’t in the cards for me,” said Da Brat. “I’ve had a great career, a full life. I felt like, because I didn’t get pregnant earlier on, then it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Da Brat shared the good news via an interview with People Magazine, but also on her personal Instagram, where she wished everyone “BLESSINGS all 2023 ❤️❤️❤️” also thanked her fertility clinic, Hope Fertility in the metro-Atlanta area.

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I don’t know that I’ve seen someone shout out their fertility clinic in their IG pregnancy announcement before? But I am so here for it! Every queer family’s journey to pregnancy looks different, but for so many, finding caring and loving fertility specialists who’ll be in lockstep with you throughout the peaks and valleys — that is indispensable. And Da Brat and Harris-Dupart know something about that. Following her egg retrieval procedure, Harris-Dupart experienced major health complications. Close followers of Autostraddle’s celesbian Vapid Fluff coverage may remember that Da Brat and Harris-Dupart soft launched a pregnancy announcement around this time last year, with Da Brat making a hand heart around her wife’s stomach. Da Brat also faced her own complications, undergoing surgery to remove fibroids (Black people with uteruses are two to three times more likely than their white counterparts to develop uterine fibroids) and polyps prior to her embryo transfer procedure.

The couple also had a miscarriage in their pregnancy journey. “I had never been so excited about something that I didn’t even know I wanted,” said Da Brat to People. “I fell in love with the idea and then it was all snatched away from me.”

The couple joked “there’s a lot of stuff we learned about women over the age of 40″ throughout this process, but as someone who’s had so many queer people I love look to expand their families in their mid-to-late 30s and over the age of 40 — do to a lot of factors, queer people are often starting their families later in life — I find their honesty to be so heartening. I can only hope it makes a lot of people feel seen today, a lighthouse as they keep wading through such vulnerable and intimate journeys of their own. This pregnancy announcement, more than just a celebration of joy, is going to make so many people feel less alone in an medical system that can be so isolating, and so very straight.

There’s also so much happiness to be had! The Grammy-nominated rapper has surprised herself, “Everything makes me cry. If someone wins American Idol, I cry. I’m like, I’m tougher than that!”

The couple chose an old school gangster-inspired pregnancy photoshoot for People magazine both as a nod to hip hop — listen, rappers have a long history of posing as gangsters of decades past — and a purposeful queering of gender expectations (my words, not theirs),  “I think people are going to be shocked!” Da Brat told People. “I love it!”

Da Brat’s been a masc-presenting performer for what feels like my entire life — Funkdafied was a staple of my childhood, and “What Chu Like” went platinum at my Middle School dances — but the rapper only officially came out in 2020. “It’s way different now than it was before,” she told People. “When I came out I was like, ‘Damn, if I knew it was going to be this nice and loving I’d have probably come out a long time ago!” As a ‘90s kid raised on a steady diet hip hop and BET, it’s enough to inspire a thug tear.

Da Brat credits her wife for “inspiring me,” saying that she wanted “to scream it from the mountaintops that I found somebody that I am totally in love with and I don’t want to hide it anymore.”

On behalf of everyone at Autostraddle, we are wishing Da Brat, Jesseca Harris-Dupart, and their three children an absolutely spectacular time together as they grow their family, in love.

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