Jennifer Aniston revealed the “selfish” reason she chose not to adopt a child.
The 56-year-old opened up about coming to terms with not having children during an upcoming appearance on the “SmartLess” podcast with Dax Shepard. Co-host Monica Padman, who is going through her own in vitro fertilization (IVF) journey, asked Aniston if there was “peace” after a decision is made.
“It’s so peaceful,” Aniston said. “But I will say there’s a point where it’s, like, this is out of my control. There’s literally nothing I can do about it.
“When people say, ‘But you can adopt,’ I don’t want to adopt,” she added. “I want my own DNA in a little person. That’s the only way, selfish or not, whatever that is, I wanted it.”
JENNIFER ANISTON CONFRONTS RUMORS ABOUT BEING ‘SELFISH’ AND ‘WORKAHOLIC’ FOR NOT HAVING CHILDREN
Aniston explained there are moments where you think about what it would have been like to have children with someone.
“It’s romanticizing it, but once you’re on the other side of it, it’s out of your control,” she noted. “It just wasn’t in the plan, whatever the plan was.”
Aniston added: “It’s very emotional, especially in the moment when they say, ‘That’s it,’ because there is a weird moment when that happens. But there’s a moment when it’s actually, ‘Oh yeah, this is not even viable.’ And you’re like, ‘Oh.’”
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Aniston recently shut down rumors that she never had kids because she’s a “workaholic.”
“They didn’t know my story, or what I’d been going through over the past 20 years to try to pursue a family, because I don’t go out there and tell them my medical woes,” she told Harper’s Bazaar U.K., pointing out that her medical matters are “not anybody’s business.”
“But there comes a point when you can’t not hear it – the narrative about how I won’t have a baby, won’t have a family, because I’m selfish, a workaholic,” she continued.
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At one point in time, Aniston took the rumors about her life “very personally” and characterized the attention on her lack of children as “really hurtful” and “nasty.”
“I used to take it all very personally – the pregnancy rumors and the whole ‘Oh, she chose career over kids’ assumption,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021. “It’s like, ‘You have no clue what’s going on with me personally, medically, why I can’t… can I have kids?’ They don’t know anything, and it was really hurtful and just nasty.”
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Aniston revealed her fertility struggles in 2022, after years of keeping the details of her journey under wraps.
“I was throwing everything at it,” Aniston said during an interview with Allure magazine. “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. There is no more, ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.’”
“I don’t have to think about that anymore.”
Aniston and Brad Pitt were married from 2000 until 2005. She moved on with ex Justin Theroux after meeting the actor on the set of “Wanderlust.” The two married in 2015 but went their separate ways in 2018.
