Jennifer Aniston has spoken in an emotional interview about trying to get pregnant through IVF, calling it a challenging road. The Friends actor, 56, was forced to deny pregnancy rumours after new pictures on her Instagram feed appeared to show her tightly hugging a pillow over her stomach.
She said she felt relieved to have spoken about her IVF journey in an interview in November 2022, telling Allure magazine she had spent so many years protecting her story about IVF and felt there was so little she got to keep to herself. The world creates narratives that aren’t true, she said, so she might as well tell the truth, adding that she felt like she was coming out of hibernation and had nothing to hide. She said the years of pregnancy speculation had been really hard. She had gone through IVF, drinking Chinese teas and throwing everything at it, she said, and wished someone had told her to freeze her eggs. “The ship has sailed. I have zero regrets,” she said, adding that she felt a little relief now because there was no more “Can I? Maybe.”
Aniston, who was married to Brad Pitt for five years until 2005, has said in the past that she would love to have a family. In 2016, she pushed back against the latest round of baby-bump speculation in a Huffington Post piece, writing that the objectification and scrutiny women are put through is absurd and disturbing. She also told People magazine that people saw her as someone who loved being engaged and would never settle down and have a family, and that she used to take it personally — she had always wanted to have kids and would love to have a family. But in 2017 she told Marie Claire Australia that nobody had considered the possibility that she was simply not having a baby by choice: she just did not want to have a baby.
Aniston rounded out her 2022 interview by saying the world is very different now, and that she feels like she is coming out of hibernation with nothing to hide — other than a heart condition, which she said was good news and bad news. A few things should be said plainly: there is no new baby announcement here at all. The article’s headline suggests Aniston has just made a heartbreaking announcement, but the body contains no pregnancy, baby, adoption, loss or recent statement — only her November 2022 disclosure that IVF had not led to a child and that “the ship has sailed”. The last three paragraphs of the article are garbled and do not fit the rest of the story, so they have been left out. The body also contradicts itself: in one place she says she always wanted children, in another she says she does not want a baby by choice.
