Personal life
Mulgrew became pregnant while acting in the lead role of Mary Ryan in Ryan's Hope. "I was single, alone, and flooded with terror. But I knew I would have that baby", Mulgrew said. She placed her daughter for adoption three days after giving birth in 1977, then in later years, searched for her. "The first man who wanted to explore this with me", said Mulgrew, "was Tim Hagan, who later became my husband."
In 1998, Mulgrew received a call from the daughter she had placed for adoption. Her name is Danielle, and she had started searching for Mulgrew a year earlier. In her 2015 memoir Born with Teeth (which refers to Mulgrew having been born with a full set of neonatal teeth), Mulgrew tells of her reunion with her daughter in 2001. In 2019, Mulgrew released a second memoir titled How to Forget.
Mulgrew married Robert Egan in 1982. They have two children. The couple separated in 1993. Their divorce became final in 1995.
In an interview for a documentary in 2024, Mulgrew discussed the personal cost associated with "giving 150%...every day for seven years", stating that while her daughter has watched Voyager her two sons have never seen her work in Star Trek, speculating that it is their way of communicating the loss they felt due to her absence while playing Janeway.
Mulgrew married Tim Hagan, a former Ohio gubernatorial candidate and a former commissioner of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in April 1999. In an interview on April 15, 2015, Mulgrew stated that she and Hagan were divorced in 2014.
Mulgrew is Catholic and an opponent of capital punishment. She has previously stated that she is an opponent of abortion and received an award from Feminists for Life, an anti-abortion feminist group and is quoted as saying, "Execution as punishment is barbaric and unnecessary", "Life is sacred to me on all levels", and "Abortion does not compute with my philosophy." However, following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Mulgrew came out with the following statement about women's choice:"Choice is what lifts us above other animals. If that fundamental right is restricted or removed we are then reduced as a species.
For myself, abortion was not an alternative, but neither was the possibility of living in a society and under the jurisdiction of a coterie of aging Republican men who somehow think they can understand what it is to have a womb. They can't. We must fight for nationwide access to contraception, especially in communities where poverty and race dictate privation. Choice is the fundamental right of every human being, especially women and people who are able to give birth.
We also need more women on the Supreme Court, and we need the conversation between men and women to be better curated than it has ever been before."Mulgrew is a rape survivor.
Mulgrew is a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Alzheimer's Association. Her mother, Joan Mulgrew, died on July 27, 2006, after a long battle with the disease.
