Jennifer Aniston has opened up about the struggles she faced while trying to get pregnant, including media scrutiny, public speculation that she wanted children and failed IVF attempts.
“It’s been a challenging road for me, the road to having kids,” the “Friends” icon said, according to the December cover of Allure magazine.
Aniston, 53, told Allure that she went through “really hard shit” trying to get pregnant in her 30s and 40s that the public didn’t know about.
“All the years and years and years of speculation… It was very hard. I was doing IVF, drinking Chinese tea. I put everything into it,” he told the magazine. “I would have given anything if someone had said, ‘Freeze the eggs.’ Do yourself a favor. You just don’t believe it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed”.
The actor, who currently stars in the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show,” described the media’s upsetting speculation at the time about what his body looked like and what it meant. She said her frustration led her to write a 2016 op-ed for HuffPost in which she criticized the media’s fixation on being pregnant and the “objectification and control” women are subjected to.
“I was so frustrated. Hence the editorial I wrote,” Aniston told Allure. “I said, ‘I have to write this because it’s so upsetting and I’m not superhuman to the point where I can’t let it sink in and hurt.’
She also addressed the false narratives that emerged about why she didn’t have children: that she was “selfish,” that she only cared about her career.
“God forbid a woman should be successful and not have a child,” Aniston said.
The actor said he spent “so many years protecting my IVF history” because “I feel like there’s so little I can keep to myself.”
“The one [world] they’re creating narratives that aren’t true, so I might as well tell the truth,” he told Allure. “I feel like I’m coming out of hibernation. I have nothing to hide. ”
Now, Aniston said, she feels better than ever and is grateful for the challenges she faced because “I was never going to be who I was meant to be.”
Aniston won a Screen Actors Guild Award in 2020 for her work on “The Morning Show” and has been nominated for eight Emmy Awards, winning one in 2002 for “Friends.” She was married to actor Brad Pitt from 2000 to 2005 and to director Justin Theroux from 2015 to 2017.
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