“It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” Jennifer Aniston said in a candid new interview where she revealed she secretly underwent IVF
Jennifer Aniston has been the subject of public scrutiny over whether she would have children (and why she hadn’t already) for her entire career. Throughout her two marriages (first to Brad Pitt, and later to Justin Theroux), tabloids ran headline after headline: “Finally a Baby for Jen,” “Yes, I’m Pregnant,” and more. Now, in a candid new interview, Aniston is discussing the impact all that speculation had on her—and revealing that for a time, she was secretly going through IVF.
In her new interview with Allure, 53-year-old Aniston opened up about the pain she felt when she secretly wanted to be a mom and all those tabloids seemed to be rubbing her face in the fact that she wasn’t.
“I would say my late 30s, 40s, I’d gone through really hard sh*t, and if it wasn’t for going through that, I would’ve never become who I was meant to be,” she explained. “That’s why I have such gratitude for all those sh*tty things. Otherwise, I would’ve been stuck being this person that was so fearful, so nervous, so unsure of who they were. And now, I don’t f*cking care.”
Then, Aniston revealed that at the same time, she was actually going through IVF and that she told “nobody” about her pregnancy journey.
“It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she said. “All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard. I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would’ve given anything if someone had said to me, ‘Freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favor.’ You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed.”
One of the hardest parts, she said, was taking in the “narrative that I was just selfish” or “just cared about my career,” along with speculation that her marriages ended because she didn’t have kids.
“And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child,” Aniston added. “And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid. It was absolute lies. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.”
Today, though, Aniston seems to be at peace with how her journey went. She told Allure that she has “no regrets” and that she feels “relief” at knowing that part of her life is now behind her.
“There is no more, ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ I don’t have to think about that anymore,” she said. “I feel the best in who I am today, better than I ever did in my 20s or 30s even, or my mid-40s. We needed to stop saying bad sh*t to ourselves.”
