Jennifer Aniston gives a rare glimpse into her past IVF attempts

Jennifer Aniston is sharing a rare glimpse into her past attempts to start a family in a vulnerable interview. Gracing the December 2022 cover of Allure, she spoke candidly and rawly about her difficult journey through IVF, and how the media glare over whether or not she would become a mother was terribly cruel on her.

"I would say my late 30s, 40s, I'd gone through really hard s***, and if it wasn't for going through that, I would've never become who I was meant to be," she told the magazine, adding that at the time, she was "trying to get pregnant."

 "It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road," she continued, noting that nobody really knew about that detail of her life and fertility journey. 

"I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it," she revealed. "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." 

She also added that the tabloid narrative that stated she didn’t want to have kids was cruel and hurtful, on top of being pure fabrications.

If we all think back to the early 2000s, when the tabloids were like vultures trying to rip apart famous women like Britney Spears, Madonna, Amy Winehouse, and Jennifer Lopez, they were also coming for The Morning Show star with what she calls the “narrative that I was just selfish. I just cared about my career.”

During this period she was married to some guy you might have heard of - Brad Pitt - and the media was so obsessed with whether or not they would conceive, Jen even took her complaints to her 2004 Saturday Night Live hosting stint, where during a sketch poking fun at the paparazzi, she played a photographer yelling at Aniston “When are you gonna have a baby!!”

“God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child,” she tells Allure before launching into the tabloids whispers that her marriage to Pitt dissolved because he wanted kids and she didn’t. “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.”

“And now, I don’t f***ing care,” she joyfully says in the interview.

While this is the first time she’s spoken publicly about her IVF journey, it’s not the first time she shared her dashed wishes for starting a family.  In 2015, while still married to her second husband Justin Theroux, she told The Hollywood Reporter "It's been a want. We're doing our best."

In 2021, the Friends star told the same outlet how the obsession with her personal life affected her career. She said she used to take the pregnancy headlines "very personally," especially the notion that she "chose career over kids."

 "It's like, 'You have no clue what's going with me personally, medically, why I can't ... can I have kids?'" she said at the time. "They don't know anything, and it was really hurtful and just nasty."

The December Allure interview is rife with other gems and rare glimpses into her life. She and Justin Theroux are still besties, despite divorcing in 2017, and he even comes over to her house (which they once shared) from time to time. Her dog is named Chesterfield, and we are low-key obsessed with this VERY GOOD BOY. The photography that accompanies the piece has the 90s icon in 90s couture, like a Chanel spring 1996 micro bikini top and a Gucci spring 1997 logo G-string.

You can read the entire interview here.