Jennifer Aniston should never have had to hide her fertility experience but her honesty about IVF is something we all needed to hear

Now 53, the beloved actress is talking openly about remaining child-free, and as she reveals, the decision wasn’t entirely hers to make.

In addition to dealing with the trials of IVF, Aniston faced down a double-edged sword: the constant rumours about what the press described as her “infertility battle”, and the effect it was having on her marriages to Brad Pitt and Justin Theroux.

“I was trying to get pregnant. It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,” Aniston noted in Allure magazine.

“All the years and years and years of speculation... It was really hard. 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 said.

The article goes on to report that, because having children is no longer possible for her, Aniston feels a level of “relief”.

“That’s why I have such gratitude for all those s****y things,” she said. “Otherwise, I would’ve been stuck being this person that was so fearful, so nervous, so unsure of who they were. And now, I don’t f***ing care.”

“I just cared about my career. And God forbid a woman is successful and doesn’t have a child,” she added in the interview. “And the reason my husband [Pitt] 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 has noted that she will elaborate more fully on her experience in the future: “I’m going to (write a book) one day,” she said. “I’ve spent so many years protecting my story about IVF. I’m so protective of these parts because I feel like there’s so little that I get to keep to myself. The world creates narratives that aren’t true, so I might as well tell the truth. I feel like I’m coming out of hibernation.”

It's no small exaggeration to say that this is a book the world very much needs.

God, I am madly in love with this refreshing candour. It’s a book very much needed in a world where the belief still exists that a woman’s worth is still tied to how well and how often they reproduce.

While more and more women are discussing the considerable cost – financial, emotional, physical – of undergoing infertility treatment, these stories almost always come with a happy ending: a babe in arms and all the domestic bliss/chaos/sleepless nights that follow. A major currency in the fertility conversation, after all, is hope.

This is usually why the journey we are so used to hearing, and the one most people in the situation want or need to know about, is the positive one.

But Aniston proves that there’s plenty of room for the other conversation: the one that seems, on the face of it, less hopeful. Less “happy". The one in which there is silence and heartbreak and a different ending.

These emotionally bruising stories often remain untold.

Author/podcaster Elizabeth Day is one of the few voices in the public IVF conversation who has yet to have a child, but as she would readily say herself, she lives very much in hope of IVF success in the future.

Yet as definitive outcomes go, an IVF journey with no child at the end of it is of equal import as the others. The IVF journey in which a woman is simply moving on with her life is perhaps not the full stop she wanted, but it’s a full stop nonetheless.

The silence around the "other” IVF journey is near deafening. A friend of mine confided some time ago that she was visiting a fertility doctor, and that she and her husband were on a regime that was all-consuming, for both of them.

It didn’t take long for the anguish, lurking just beneath her jokey, self-confident veneer, to make its way to the surface.

It was a conversation she was simultaneously resentful at having to have, while also being desperate to offload and lessen the loneliness.

Two years later, there is still no pitter-patter business.

How much anguish has there been for my friend between then and now? I’m ashamed to say that I’m afraid to bring it up.

Part of me wants to be respectful, to not encroach on a very private thing, and allow her to bring this up when she wants. But what happens in this case is yet more silence. Crushing, unhelpful silence.

I don’t have a dog in the infertility fight, but I still eagerly await the day that Jennifer Aniston expands on these experiences in a book. So many people need to hear about a life after the cost of IVF in which nothing was acquired.

And for everyone else on "Poor Jen”-watch, the boring false narrative that career-obsessed Aniston “forgot” to have kids can finally take a breather.

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