In 2022, she elaborated on what she had been going through “behind closed doors”, revealing that she tried for many years to conceive a baby and had unsuccessful fertility treatment.

“It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road,’ she told Allure magazine, detailing multiple rounds of failed IVF, all the while having to deal with the press furiously speculating as to whether she was pregnant or not. “All those years and years of speculation,” she said, “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. That ship has sailed.”

What Jennifer is tapping into here and has so unwittingly become the poster girl of, is the misogyny and prejudice so inherent in society towards women without children, despite the fact that single child-free women are the fastest growing demographic, with 45% of women predicted to be single and childless by 2030.

I know firsthand about this prejudice, and it is a depressing reality I experience all the time. For many years, I was single, pursuing my career, with a string of unsuccessful romances under my belt. And all I would ever be asked, when not being grilled about my ‘wild sex life’ by bored married friends, was when I was going to ‘settle down’ and have kids. As if it were a choice, something I could just conjure up. Then, two years ago, at the age of 42, I finally met the love of my life. And within literal months of us dating, all anyone wanted to know was when we were going to start trying for a baby. It was an awful amount of pressure on me, my boyfriend and of course, my dwindling fertility.

But it also revealed the deep-rooted desire amongst society and humankind that we must, as women, procreate. And that women without kids – or who don’t want kids – are seen as an anomaly, like there’s something wrong with them. Single women and those without children are not allowed to just exist. This is something that Jennifer has also reflected on.

“We’re seeing women through that very narrow lens. If we don’t have a baby or a white picket fence or a husband, then we’re useless. We aren’t living up to our purpose,” she said in 2016.

For me, now, two years on from meeting my man and two rounds of unsuccessful fertility treatment later, I too know the pain of a challenging and unsuccessful baby-making road. Having lived through the devastating disappointment of unsuccessful IVF, it is now even more painful when the subject is raised. And now I look back on all those many stories I was involved in speculating on Jennifer’s fertility, and I can’t imagine how horrendous that must have been, and no amount of fame or fortune could – or should – justify that. Just this month, Jennifer told Vanity Fair how it impacted her, “I didn’t have a strong enough constitution to not get affected by it. We’re human beings, even though some people don’t want to believe we are,” she said. “They think, You signed up for it, so you can take it. But we really didn’t sign up for that.”