Jennifer Aniston regrets not freezing her eggs, as she opens up about IVF struggles
Aniston reveals in a new interview that she once tried very hard to become a mother, contrary to gossip that Brad Pitt left her because she didn't want to have children.
For the first time ever, Jennifer Aniston has opened up about her struggles to get pregnant, blasting speculation that she was too career-focused to become a mother and that Brad Pitt left her because she refused to have children.
Speaking about a painful period of her life an unspecified number of years ago, the 53-year-old “Friends” star told Allure magazine, “I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road.”
In the interview that was published Wednesday, Aniston spoke of her struggle to get pregnant.
“All the years and years and years of speculation … It was really hard,” Aniston said. “I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. 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.”
For years in the pop culture universe, particularly after Aniston split from Pitt in 2005 and he began a high-profile relationship with the more apparently fecund Angelina Jolie, headlines feverishly speculated on why Aniston didn’t have children. This speculation gave rise to the “sad” Jennifer Aniston narrative because she was not a mother and because, it seemed, she had yet to find lasting love. Her marriage to Justin Theroux also ended in divorce in 2017 after just two years.
Adding to the personal pain of not getting pregnant was the “narrative that I was just selfish,” Aniston told Allure.
“I just cared about my career,” Aniston said. “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.”
Aniston previously addressed the gossip about her personal life in a 2016 HuffPost op-ed she wrote about being “fed up” with all the “sport-like scrutiny,” especially of whether she looked pregnant in photos. She took issue with the gossip running rampant “under the guise of ‘journalism,’ the ‘First Amendment’ and ‘celebrity news.'”
To Allure, Aniston said, “I was like, ‘I’ve just got to write this (op-ed) because it’s so maddening and I’m not superhuman to the point where I can’t let it penetrate and hurt.'”
It’s not clear when Aniston began her journey with in vitro fertilization, or if she was using her own eggs or donor eggs.
While IVF can help women have children in their 40s and even early 50s, it’s also known that success rates directly correlate with age of the egg. As Aniston mentioned, some young women choose to freeze their eggs before they face the biological threshold of age 35, while they focus on their careers or look for a suitable partner.
Data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology on the success rates for IVF says that for women under 35, the percentage of live births using the patient’s own eggs for a singleton, or one child, is 51%, Today.com reported this summer.
For women ages 35-37, the IVF success rate is 38.3% for live births using the patient’s own eggs. At ages 38-40, the percentage drops to 25.1%, and for ages 41-42, it is 12.7%. For women older than 42, the IVF success rate drops to 4.1% .
According to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, older eggs carry increased risks of chromosomal abnormalities that can cause miscarriage and birth defects. For this reason, women in this age group have much more success using donor eggs when undergoing in vitro fertilization.