Jennifer Aniston Opened Up About Her “Challenging” IVF Journey

Jennifer Aniston no longer wants to hide her innermost secrets. In a new Allure cover story, the Friends star and ’90s icon opened up about her desire to and struggle with getting pregnant while in her late 30s and 40s. “I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” the 53-year-old star said. “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. 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.”

Aniston revealed that she was trying medical options like IVF and spiritual remedies like Chinese teas to make it happen. “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.”

Aniston didn’t mention either of her ex-husbands directly when speaking about her fertility journey, but Justin Theroux showed his support in the comment section of her Instagram post. Theroux, whom Aniston is openly on good terms with after their 2017 divorce, commented a simple fist-pumping emoji with a heart emoji. Her first husband, Brad Pitt, has not made any public comments about the profile.

For Aniston, the most brutal part was the media coverage of her personal life. Tabloids routinely made assumptions that she was “selfish” and claimed that she was too focused on her career. “God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid,” she said of the false headlines. “It was absolute lies. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.”

The media coverage bothered her so much that she wrote an op-ed for HuffPost in 2016, in which she wrote emphatically, “For the record, I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up.” Speaking with Allure, she reflected on what drove her to that moment. “I got so frustrated. I was like, ‘I’ve just got to write this because it’s so maddening and I’m not superhuman to the point where I can’t let it penetrate and hurt.’”

Aniston’s journey has been one of self-love and of self-preservation. “I’ve spent so many years protecting my story about IVF. I’m so protective of these parts because I feel like there’s so little that I get to keep to myself,” she said. “The [world] creates narratives that aren’t true, so I might as well tell the truth. I feel like I’m coming out of hibernation. I don’t have anything to hide.”