CLAUDIA CONNELL: Like Jennifer Aniston, I did everything I could to be a mother

Jennifer Aniston was always my favourite in Friends. Blonde, funny and a little bit vulnerable, there was something about her and her character that connected with me. I even sported the famous ‘Rachel’ haircut for a couple of years.

Many years ago I met Jennifer in the loos at a showbiz party. She told me how fantastic I looked in my leather trousers, adding that she could never pull them off as ‘my ass is too big’. It really wasn’t, but it was an endearing way for a superstar to make a nobody feel a bit special.

When I read Jennifer’s most recent interview, I realised we had more in common than I thought. I felt teary and protective of her when she admitted for the first time that, like me, she had endured years of unsuccessful IVF cycles but, unlike me, bitterly regrets not freezing her eggs when younger.

‘I was trying to get pregnant, it was a challenging road for me, the baby making road,’ the 53-year-old told Allure magazine, referring to a period in her late 30s and 40s. ‘I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it. I was throwing everything at it. I would have given anything if someone had said ‘freeze your eggs. Do yourself a favour.’ You just don’t think of it.’

I’m sad to think of Jennifer — or any woman of post-fertility age — torturing herself about not freezing her eggs, because it really isn’t the magical solution many women believe it to be.

There’s a cruel irony to the fact that by the time you think about freezing your eggs, you’re probably already too old for it to work. The average age for a woman to freeze her eggs in the UK is 38; the optimum time to do so is between the ages of 27 and 34.

But what 27-year-old is going to be worrying about future fertility? At that age you’re still finding your way in the world, convinced that Mr Right is just around the corner. For many, he is.

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston VANITY FAIR PARTY, OSCARS 2000

Claudia Connell: ‘Many years ago I met Jennifer in the loos at a showbiz party. She told me how fantastic I looked in my leather trousers, adding that she could never pull them off as ‘my ass is too big’. It really wasn’t, but it was an endearing way for a superstar to make a nobody feel a bit special’

I was 38 when I first dipped my toe into the world of fertility treatment. Visiting a private clinic in London to discuss donor insemination, blood tests showed my hormone levels were good, while scans showed my ovaries and uterus lining looked perfect. I was given a 30 per cent chance of success. I read some of the profiles of the anonymous donors and decided they all sounded like a bunch of dorks I would cross the road to avoid in the real world.

‘Maybe I’ll freeze my eggs instead,’ I said to the consultant — who promptly pulled up a graph on her PC that showed how very slim the chances of success were.

‘If I was your daughter, what would you tell me?’ I asked her.

‘Don’t waste your money on egg-freezing, and get your donor sperm from Denmark,’ she told me with remarkable candour.

Back then (18 years ago) it would have cost £2,000 to freeze my eggs; today, it’s anything up to £5,000. But though the price may have shot up, the success rates are still depressingly low.

Among women under 35, the proportion of frozen eggs that lead to a baby is just 8.2 per cent. For those over 35 it’s 3.3 per cent. The big problem with egg-freezing is that it’s not until the woman wants to take her eggs out of the deep freeze that she will truly know whether the process has been successful.

You can harvest a crop of a dozen fresh and healthy eggs, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be damaged and made non-viable by the freezing process (called vitrification).

Though a 38-year-old career woman could be lulled into believing that, just because she has eggs stored in a deep freeze somewhere, the pressure is off, it’s sadly not.

Fertility clinics reported that egg-freezing inquiries soared by 50 per cent during lockdown. It worries me that so many women consider this so-called ‘social freezing’ — the term used when eggs or ovarian tissue are frozen for non-medical causes — to be some kind of motherhood insurance policy.

With such pitiful success rates, it’s little wonder that IVF pioneer Lord (Robert) Winston branded egg-freezing ‘extremely unsuccessful’ and ‘an expensive confidence trick’.

Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green in FRIENDS

Actress Jennifer Aniston arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere ‘Marley & Me’ at the Mann Villager Theater on December 11, 2008 in Westwood, California

As much as we would all love to believe we can apply the brakes to our fertility and put motherhood on hold, we really can’t.

So I didn’t waste my money on egg-freezing. Instead, I went down the road of adoption. I was approved by my local authority and was a year into the process before quitting in sheer exasperation.

In 12 months I had been assigned three different social workers who, between them, had managed to lose my files dozens of times and failed to show for endless appointments.

My panel date (when you are officially approved) was cancelled at the last minute after it transpired that my social worker had forgotten to run the required criminal record checks on my family.

By then, I was pushing 40 and had decided ‘enough’. I couldn’t devote any more time to pursuing something that was proving so stressful, joyless and fruitless.

Instead, I threw myself into work, travel and decorating the London flat where I lived alone very happily. That worked for about a year. But something happens when the shutters start to come down on a woman’s fertility. That ticking clock becomes deafening and you enter a panic ‘baby hunger’ mode — the realisation that it’s now or never if you’re going to try to have a child.

The 40-year-old me tried to project how the 50-year-old me might feel if I was still childless.

‘Would you like to know that at least you’d done everything you could and thrown everything at it?’ I asked myself. ‘Or will you be eaten up with regret that you didn’t act while you had the chance?’

I decided that the first option was the only sensible answer.

I didn’t talk to anyone about my desire to have a child, and didn’t jump in to defend myself when friends and family members declared I had put my career first.

The idea that a childless woman of a certain age equates to selfish career bitch is an unfair trope women have had to endure for years. Nobody ever knows the truth about someone’s childless status. I still get asked today why I ‘decided’ to not have children.

Seventeen years after her split from Brad Pitt, Jennifer is still furious that blame for the failed marriage was laid firmly at her door.

‘The narrative [was] that I was just selfish. I just cared about my career,’ she says. ‘And God forbid a woman is just successful and doesn’t have a child. And the reason my husband left me, why we broke up and ended our marriage, was because I wouldn’t give him a kid. It was absolute lies.’

Jennifer was 35 when she split from Pitt. It’s possible she was having IVF at the time. One can only imagine the pain of then watching your husband go off with another woman only to conceive very quickly with her — as Brad did with Angelina Jolie. Their daughter Shiloh was conceived just over a year after Jennifer and Brad’s split.

At least, as a single woman, I didn’t have to shoulder the burden of somebody else’s hopes and emotions. Within my circle of friends are two married women who both failed to conceive through IVF.

Both told their husbands they would understand if they left them to have a child with another woman. Both husbands assured their wives they loved them and would never dream of doing any such thing. Both eventually did. I suspect it happens far more than we realise.

Jennifer was 35 when she split from Pitt. It’s possible she was having IVF at the time. One can only imagine the pain of then watching your husband go off with another woman only to conceive very quickly with her — as Brad did with Angelina Jolie (Aniston pictured in social media post this month) 

As for me, I trotted off back to the clinic to talk about the artificial insemination I had previously considered, only to be told that time was not on my side — I should really jump straight into IVF. I decided to have my first cycle abroad as, even allowing for flights and accommodation, it was still less than half the price of treatment in the UK.

I was 42 and used my own eggs and donor sperm. My chances of success at that age were less than 3 per cent. So, when it didn’t work it was no great shock. My intention was to draw a line under it and move on.

But IVF messes with your head and can become weirdly addictive. Clinics don’t help matters by preying on a woman’s desperation. Many even have a ‘three cycles or your money back’ offer, where they will refund you if there’s no baby after your third try.

I didn’t go with the test-tube baby equivalent of a supermarket buy-one-get-one-free offer, but I did have another cycle of IVF aged 43, this time using donor sperm and donor eggs.

The protocol with donor cycles is very different. You have to take drugs that suppress your own ovulation and throw your body into menopause overnight.

I was also prescribed a course of steroids that were thought to boost the chances of embryo implantation. I gained a stone in weight in a matter of weeks; my swollen face looked like a giant pink balloon. One friend, unaware of what I was going through, asked me if I’d like to go to Slimming World with her.

In 2016, Jennifer Aniston, then 47, penned an angry open letter that was published in the Huffington Post after stories of her rumoured pregnancy circulated. They were the result of holiday pictures with her (then) second husband Justin Theroux that showed her looking a little heavier than normal.

Her tummy wasn’t washboard flat, her face a bit fuller. She wasn’t pregnant but it’s possible the bloat was from hellish IVF drugs.

Jennifer admitted that nobody knew about her IVF cycles and I didn’t tell anyone about mine either. I didn’t want their judgment or opinions but, mostly, I didn’t want the stress of their expectations, the constant calls to see if it had worked, the commiserations when it didn’t.

I don’t know how many cycles Jennifer had, but I had three. One thing we don’t have in common is unlimited funds. Aged 45, I did one more cycle with donor egg and sperm which brought my total expenditure to £30,000 — an amount I acquired by remortgaging my flat.

Unlike with my previous two cycles, I had a feeling this one had worked. You’d think I’d have been elated — but I started to panic. I would be 50 when my child started school, 60 when they were a door-slamming teenager. And it wasn’t even ‘mine’. I’d have no biological connection whatsoever. What had I done?

Sure enough the pregnancy test was positive. And, instead of celebrating, I told nobody. The phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ couldn’t have been more apt. I was pregnant with a baby I now had doubts about. At five weeks the embryo failed to develop, chalked up to what’s called a ‘chemical pregnancy’. The relief was immeasurable.

I’m now aged 56 and childless. Jennifer is 53 and in the same boat. I admire her hugely for not going down the surrogacy route that so many Hollywood stars do.

I regret my IVF; she does not regret hers. But what we both feel now is huge comfort in knowing that we gave motherhood our best shot — and can now draw a line under it.

‘The ship has sailed,’ says Jennifer. ‘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 any more.’

My only advice to Jen would be this: Don’t waste too many ‘if only’ regrets about that decision not to freeze your eggs. Because it really wasn’t the missed opportunity you believe it to be.