Friends actress Jennifer Aniston has now been in the public eye for most of her life. As the daughter of Days of Our Lives actor John Aniston and the star of one of the most popular TV shows of the 1990s and early 2000s, she’s faced continual public scrutiny and criticism over her life and decisions.
One area that’s proved most controversial is her choosing not to have children. BaIn 2005, during her now infamous divorce from her first husband Brad Pitt, many pieces of the media spun a narrative that the cause of the divorce was that she was too career-driven and refused to have kids.
In an interview by Vanity Fair following the divorce, Aniston criticized this narrative and pointed out that a man would never be accused of refusing to have children and causing a marriage to fall apart.
After their divorce, Pitt quickly moved on to Angelina Jolie and established himself as the doting father to four children. All the while Aniston continued to battle the media over her decision not to have any of her own.
Pregnancy rumors even began to spring up for Aniston during her three-year marriage to Justin Theroux. The media’s obsession with motherhood drove Aniston to directly address these stories in a 2016 op-ed for the Huffington Post in called “For The Record.”
In her op-ed, she criticized the paparazzi for harassing her and her husband and called out tabloids for spreading baseless rumors. She argued that defining a woman’s worth by their maternity is ridiculous, going on to say that she and other childless women are complete on their own regardless of familial or marital status: “We get to decide for ourselves what is beautiful when it comes to our bodies.”
It wasn’t until recently that Aniston opened up about her struggles with fertility and her journey with IVF. In an interview with Allure in 2022, she said that she had tried to get pregnant for many years while tabloids continued to put out pregnancy rumors. Aniston had admitted this was a difficult period of time for her but she has no regrets.
Despite her own struggles to conceive, Aniston has played a mother several times, even experiencing Rachel’s entire pregnancy journey on Friends. Most recently, Aniston has said that despite her struggles she’s happy with how her life ended up and that she doesn’t need children to make her whole.