Jennifer Aniston Opens Up About Her "Challenging" Fertility Journey

In an interview with Allure for its last-ever print issue, Jennifer Aniston opened up about the painful pregnancy rumors she endured for years—and revealed the "challenging" fertility journey she was enduring at the same time. “I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” she told the outlet.

Throughout the 2010s, newsstands were plastered with images of Aniston with headlines along the lines of “Is that a baby bump?” All the while, Aniston was trying extensively to get pregnant, she told Allure. "All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard," she says.."I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would have 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."

Back in 2005, Aniston divorced Brad Pitt after five years of marriage, which only added to the harsh rumors. The divorce contributed to the false “narrative that I was just selfish,” Aniston told Allure. “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. I don’t have anything to hide at this point.”

Even years later, during her relationship with Justin Theroux (who Aniston was with from 2011 to 2018), the pregnancy rumors continued to run rampant. For instance, rumors circulated that she had a “baby bump” in paparazzi photos taken during her 2016 vacation in the Bahamas. A rep later released the statement, "What you see is her having just enjoyed a delicious big lunch and her feeling safe on private property," per ET.

Eventually, Aniston had enough of the speculation and decided the set the record straight. “I got so frustrated. Hence that op-ed I wrote (referring to her 2016 piece for The Huffington Post, in which she criticizes the media for its obsession with her being pregnant). 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.’”

Now at 53 years old, Aniston said she has “zero regrets” on how things played out. “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,” she says.  

“I would say my late 30s, 40s, I’d gone through really hard shit, and if it wasn’t for going through that, I would’ve never become who I was meant to be,” she explains. “That’s why I have such gratitude for all those shitty 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.”