Do yourself a favour and freeze your eggs

I’m not sure if it was carelessness or an oversight but growing up there were a lot of things my parents failed to tell me.

They neglected, for instance, to encourage me to invest my savings rather than let them languish in a no-interest bank account where my money effectively went backwards. They didn’t tell me to carry essentials like medication or contact lenses with me on flights in case my checked luggage went missing. And they gave me absolutely no relationship advice other than tutting when my 17-year-old date beeped his car horn in the driveway rather than coming to the door.

Consequently, I turn every other conversation with my daughters into a “teachable moment”. Typically, they groan at my unsolicited advice — well, until I forget to give it and the eldest ends up scraping raw chicken scraps into the kitchen rubbish rather than bagging them and putting them in the outdoor bin. The maggot infestation was biblical and we kept finding the little buggers for days.

But chief among my casually delivered life advice is the one thing I think all parents should discuss with their daughters: freezing their eggs.

No problem if they don’t want kids but if they do, I’ve told them, they need to use all tests and technologies available and consider giving themselves the best biological advantage if they need to delay becoming a parent due to choice or circumstance.

Which brings me to Jennifer Aniston because I think she’s a dead-set legend for speaking up about her fertility battle. As she told Allure magazine: “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.”

Aniston’s photoshoot to accompany the interview has somewhat obscured the magnitude of her words because commentators focused on the pictures, questioning what a 53-year-old woman is doing trying to prove her continuing “f***ability” by conforming to oppressive beauty standards by posing half naked for the magazine.

Frankly, I don’t care if Aniston takes her clothes off until she’s 106 — and nor would I care if Melissa McCarthy or James Corden did likewise. Their bodies, their choice. But I am in awe of her decision to be so open and generous, particularly after decades of enduring toxic levels of scrutiny and pity. Nobody’s uterus has been the subject of so many headlines as hers and yet in an act of absolute grace she has compromised her own privacy to bravely reveal her own infertility struggles.

As her interviewer exclaims: “I had no idea.”

None of us did. Yet for years we projected our baby hopes on to her, signalling that while she may be a great actor she wasn’t complete without a child. “Poor Jen”, faux sympathised the magazines every time the merest of bumps – doubtless just her lunch or the insidious work of an editor skilled in Adobe Photoshop – was followed by an image of her with a flat stomach.

Aniston owed us nothing, especially after we pitted her against Angelina Jolie in our own artlessly contrived Hollywood hot-girl boxing match. Having lost one husband we were then quizzical when she failed to produce a baby with her second one.

One doctor has called Aniston a “poster woman for fertility shaming”.

As Devora Lieberman, the medical director of City Fertility NSW, so succinctly puts it: “She was my poster woman for fertility shaming.”

Which makes it all the more remarkable that Aniston is now revealing what she went through. She threw everything at trying to have a baby, she says, even as the narrative persisted “that I was just selfish, I just cared about my career. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid.”

Aniston hasn’t opened up because she seeks our sympathy. I suspect her motivations are two-fold. Her fertility window has now closed — as she says, “there is no more ‘Can I? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe’” which means her sense of longing won’t necessarily have evaporated but it will have shifted. Secondly, she is simply a good person. She has used her fame to offer an instruction to all young women. She’s not saying “woe is me” she’s saying “do yourself a favour”. As Lieberman tells me, freezing your eggs at 33 is more effective than embarking on IVF at 43 but it’s more than that: “It shifts women’s thinking and makes them more empowered and less panicky,” she says.

If Aniston’s message is a jolt to the young, it is also an act of solidarity towards those, like her, who haven’t been able to conceive. As she says: “I’ve gone through really hard shit and if it wasn’t for going through that, I would’ve never become who I was meant to be.”

I salute her, not only for her words but for the photos that accompany them. I’m sure she’d have loved nothing more than to pose on a magazine cover with her baby. Let’s thank her for her message and let her show off her strong, beautiful body instead.

ANGELA LOVES

Book

Now that we can travel again, grab a copy of Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel to consider more deeply why we journey and what it means to us rather than simply what we’ll do when we get there.

Swimsuits

Kudos to designers who are making one-pieces that cover your shoulders without having to go the full rash vest.

Canape

I made up a fab little snack for a drinks party last Sunday. Cut up a French stick, slather each slice in cream cheese mixed with horseradish, top with shaved rare roast beef, grilled capsicum (out of a jar) and chopped chives.

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