Jennifer Aniston is reclaiming her narrative.

In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar U.K., published Oct. 8, the Friends alum addressed long-standing speculation that she chose not to have children in order to focus on her career—rumors that intensified after her 2005 divorce from Brad Pitt.

“They didn’t know my story, or what I’d been going through over the past 20 years to try to pursue a family,” Aniston shared. “Because I don’t go out there and tell them my medical woes. That’s not anybody’s business.”

The 56-year-old, who has previously spoken about undergoing years of IVF treatments, said the narrative that painted her as “selfish” or “career-obsessed” took a personal toll.

“It does affect me—I’m just a human being,” she continued. “We’re all human beings.”

Aniston ultimately turned her frustration into action, penning a powerful 2016 HuffPost op-ed that called out the media’s relentless and unfair treatment of women in the public eye.

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“That’s why I thought, ‘What the hell?’” she recalled of the essay. “I knew a lot of women at the time who were trying to have kids, who were dealing with IVF. So it did feel like it was not only for myself, but for any women who were struggling with the same issue.”

With the media landscape shifting, Jennifer—who soft-launched her romance with hypnotherapist Jim Curtis last month—did acknowledge that the days of the “circle of shame” have continued to diminish.

The Morning Show star previously shared insight into the “many years” she spent keeping her fertility journey out of the public eye.

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“I was trying to get pregnant,” she told Allure in November 2022. “It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road.”

“All the years and years and years of speculation… It was really hard,” she reflected. “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.”

Although Jennifer wasn’t able to get pregnant, she doesn’t regret trying every possible remedy. She emphasized, “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.”

For more celebs who’ve spoken about their fertility journey, keep reading.

Bella Robertson

The Duck Dynasty star and husband Jacob Mayo have been open about why it’s important for them to give insight into their fertility struggles on her family’s new reality series.

“We share the story of infertility in the show and that’s something that we haven’t really shared publicly that much, but that’s something that others just don’t know.” Bella said in a joint May 2025 interview with Jacob for Us Weekly. “When you just look at someone on social media, you can’t know what anyone’s going through.”

For them, it not only “felt right” but allowed the pair to be their “authentic selves on this new show.”

The Dancing With the Stars cohost has been open about her struggles with endometriosis, a female reproductive disease, and has been working to preserve her fertility for when she feels ready to try and have a baby.In June 2025, she shared that she froze her eggs for the third time

Since welcoming Sonny with husband Tim Rosenman in 2017, the Hills alum has been candid about the ups and downs of her fertility journey, including her two pregnancy losses and her surrogate’s two miscarriages.In July 2024, Whitney confirmed she’s preparing for a second egg retrieval.

“I’m feeling definitely better than my last round because I know a little bit more what to expect,” she shared, “and I just have so much trust and faith in my doctor.”

But no matter what happens in their journey to welcome a second child, Whitney has been clear there is nothing lacking in her family of three.

“Especially now, as we embark on this fertility journey for number two, I know we are complete no matter what,” she wrote as part of a birthday tribute to her son on his 7th birthday in July 2024. “You are a blessing. We love watching you grow and are beyond grateful for how chill you are.”

The Everything Everywhere All At Once star—who married Jean Todt in 2023 after a 19-year engagement—once opened up about the challenges she experienced trying to conceive with her first husband, Dickson Poon.”I always wanted to have children,” Michelle shared during a podcast appearance in November 2024. “I went and did fertility [treatments] to aid in the process. I think that’s the worst moment to go through is every month. You feel like such a failure.”

She continued, “At some point, you stop blaming yourself. There are certain things in your body that don’t function in a certain way. That’s how it is. You just have to let go and move on.

The rapper, who shares son Wilde with husband Maximillion Cooper, once detailed a heartbreaking pregnancy loss she experienced due to an ectopic pregnancy while filming her sitcom Eve.”It was 2006 when I found out that I was pregnant,” Eve wrote in her memoir Who’s That Girl?. “I had to have emergency surgery and stop filming the show for two weeks. I don’t know why I lied to everyone on set and said that my appendix had ruptured, really. Maybe because I was lying to myself.”

“If I faced losing my baby, then I didn’t know if two weeks would be enough emotional healing time,” she continued. “In the end, it was barely enough healing time for me physically, before I was right back to work on set. I had lost so much weight after the surgery, and my body was so frail.”

The Selling Sunset star, who welcomed her son Austin at the age of 15, has been candid about her and husband Romain Bonnet‘s fertility journey.“We don’t know what the outcome is going to be,” she told E! News in September 2024. “We’re just kind of taking it as it as it comes. I’ve been super busy right now with the book and with the season and everything. So, I know nothing’s going to happen if I’m stressed out and if I’m running around.”

And in addition to undergoing a surgery to rectify a septate uterus (when the uterus is divided into two parts by a membrane), Mary said she and Romain aren’t rushing into any decisions—and are happy with their dog.

“We have our fur baby though, Thor. Romaine is obsessed with him,” added the real estate agent. “So if it doesn’t happen, he says he’s OK. He’s got his little fur baby, and he is just beyond obsessed. We’ll be OK. What’s meant to be will be.

The NFL sportscaster and her husband Jarret Stoll, who welcomed son Mack in July 2023, have had their own fair share of ups and downs amid their journey to parenthood—including navigating Erin’s cervical cancer diagnosis in 2017.But having frozen her eggs before her cancer battle, she then underwent IVF to help her conceive a child—an experience she decided to share with the world.

“I just was so tired of keeping quiet,” she explained of sharing her struggles in a 2021 essay. “It was such a hard, painful journey. I think I went numb through most of it, because you just feel like a robot and you’re on this really unfair roller coaster that more times out of none, you’re going to get really bad news.”

She added, “I’m a vocal person, and I could speak from the heart and just talk about how crappy it was and that I get it for a lot of couples and families that are trying to have a child.”