From the late 90s and for a good two decades, the Friends star’s fertility was the subject of much scrutiny. For a while there, the sun would not set on a day ending in a -y without some article being published about the fact Jen wasn’t pregnant yet.
How dare she deprive the world from her offspring? She is, after all, an objectively beautiful woman so, surely, she should give the world some beautiful babies, right?
Wrong.
Jennifer Aniston doesn’t owe us any babies. But we, as a society, owe her an apology.
We owe her an apology for the decades of constant, tireless scrutiny, the exhausting and painful discourse about her “selfishness” for daring to put her career over motherhood.
For one thing, even if she was choosing her career over birthing a human, that’d be none of our business. But what makes it extra painful is that none of those assumptions were even true.
In an interview with Allure magazine this month, the Hollywood star, now 53, opened up about her IVF journey and her struggles to conceive the child that the world kept demanding of her.
“It was really hard,” she told the magazine. “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 favour’. You just don’t think it. So here I am today. The ship has sailed.”
She also touched on the toll that the accusations of “selfishness” had on her. “I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child. And [speculation that] 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 am lucky enough to not know first-hand the pain of not being able to conceive. I cannot imagine it. And I really cannot imagine going through IVF, trying everything you can to conceive a child, only to read about how you’re a selfish, career-hungry woman who has ruined the family because you haven’t had a kid.
This is a woman who could not have one bit of ciabatta without a magazine cover hinting at a bun in the oven. Because the reality is that, no matter how accomplished a woman is, no matter how successful, happy and fulfilled they are, the world still sees motherhood as the ultimate achievement.
Now we know that she wasn’t choosing her career over a baby - and sure, that is caused for justified sympathy. But if we only understand how awful the collective obsession with her fertility was because we found out she wanted a baby, then we have missed the point entirely. “How were we to know what she was going through?” some will say, in an attempt to justify the scrutiny. We weren’t to know - because it wasn’t for us to know, and because it really shouldn’t have made any difference. Jennifer Aniston should have been able to choose not to have a child without anyone passing judgment on that choice.
Her words in Allure magazine are a reminder that we never know what is going on in someone’s life and that asking people when they’re getting pregnant is never, ever, a good idea. As a society, we need to collectively agree to stop asking women when they’re having a baby - not just for the sake of the ones who can’t, but also for the sake of the ones who don’t want to.
For some women, the answer to that question might be “soon”. For others, it might be “never”. For all of them, it’s also definitely “none of your business”.
