Jennifer Aniston On Her IVF Journey: "I Was Throwing Everything At It"

Jennifer Aniston is getting personal about a “challenging” time in her life, addressing the decades of public speculation about her fertility. Now, at 53-years-old, she has “nothing to hide,” including the details about her painful journey through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and how the public speculation for years made it all worse.

In the December issue of Allure, Aniston discussed her long journey to getting pregnant for the first time ever. She also touched on how the constant public speculation about her fertility added to the pain of it all.

"I was trying to get pregnant," she told Allure in the cover story published November 9th, 2022. "It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road."

She explained that although there was a lot of speculation on whether she was or wasn’t pregnant over the years, “nobody” knew how hard she was trying to have a baby.

Instead, headlines questioned why she hadn’t had a baby yet, with many making negative assumptions about her and her choices. Sometimes, this speculation went the opposite way —accusing her of being pregnant when she was not.

“I got so frustrated,” Aniston said in the interview. As a result, she said she wrote an op-ed in The Huffington Post slamming the obsession with her pregnancy — or lack thereof. “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.’”

All that weighed on her heavily while she quietly struggled in private.

"All the years and years and years of speculation... It was really hard," she admitted. "I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it.”

Aniston explained that adding to the pain of struggling with fertility was the “narrative that I was just selfish” in her marriage to ex-husband Brad Pitt.

She added, “I just cared about my career. And 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. It was absolute lies.”

Although she has “no regrets” today and she doesn’t have “anything to hide at this point,” she acknowledges that “the ship has sailed” on getting pregnant.

“I actually feel a little relief now because there is no more, ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’ I don’t have to think about that anymore.”