For The Record, The Jennifer Aniston Adoption Story Isn’t Any Of Our Business

I have a confession to make. When I heard the news this week that [Jennifer Aniston](http://Jennifer Aniston Invites Friends Courteney Cox And Lisa Kudrow Over To Celebrate Her Emmy Nomination) will announce she’s adopting a child during the Friends reunion I was so excited. I loved the idea of seeing her with a kid who we’d get to watch grow up over the years. Then came the statement from Jen An HQ that the story was a ‘fabrication’. Her representatives told TMZ the rumour is ‘false and never happened.’

I realised, suddenly, my excitement and weird fascination in her private life - and my assumption that we’d be entitled to watch her family grow - was intrusive; these rumours were no different to the fake pregnancy gossip and fanatical womb watching she’s been subjected to over the years.

For her, this story of adoption will have been another case of the world obsessing over her plans to have children. It’s yet another symptom of a society that can’t fathom how a woman can be happy and complete if she doesn’t fulfil the role of becoming a mother.

Since Jen, now 52, reached her fifties, the hard facts of biology have meant we’ve been forced to move on from the idea she’ll get pregnant. So what shall we do now? Fabricate stories about her plans to adopt of course. Even if she is going down the adoption route, it’s none of our business.

Remember the time the world obsessed over David Schwimmer’s (Ross from Friends) fertility and whether he was going to have a child? No. Obviously it didn’t happen. He’s only two years older than Jennifer and has married, divorced and aged in front of the world’s glare just like her. But he’s managed to keep his family life and plans to procreate relatively under wraps, by virtue of being a man.

Jen couldn’t keep her private life private if she tried (and boy has she tried). It’s treated as public property by virtue of her being a beautiful, successful woman in Hollywood.

Ok, a marriage and a divorce to Brad Pitt did up the ante when it came to her particular star appeal, but we obsess over women's family plans in a way we don't about men's. At the crux of this is the archaic notion that women are incomplete unless they have children. Us child-free women really aren’t that weird you know – except for our tails, I guess.

We interrogate women on whether they have a boyfriend, when they’ll get married and when they’ll get pregnant, not satisfied until they have a brood. We pry, prod and then we pity them if the trajectory doesn’t follow the plans we project onto them - even though Jen has spoken about how she's perfectly happy, as are millions of single or child-free women. This adoption story shows we won’t stop until every possible avenue to motherhood is exhausted.

In 2016 Jen addressed the years-long speculation over whether or not she’s pregnant in an open letter on HuffPost’s website, where she wrote ‘For the record, I am not pregnant. What I am is fed up.’ She pointed out how we put all the women in our lives through this ‘objectification and scrutiny’ and called it absurd and disturbing.

Despite being a Hollywood star she's always been so relatable - that's why we're rooting for her happiness - but let's recognise the limits and boundaries around that. We should learn from this adoption rumour that it really is time we accept that Jennifer Aniston is complete as she is. No more ‘poor Jen’. If we don’t think being one of the most successful actors in the world is enough, then, clearly, we are the problem.

Read more: How Jennifer Aniston Made The Friends Reunion Happen

The Friends cast, now and then