Aisha Tyler Affirmed Her ‘Valid Choice’ Not to Try Having Kids
Aisha Tyler is an actor, comedian, and talk-show host who has been in the spotlight for decades. Funny, charming, and immensely talented, she has appeared in many popular TV shows, including Criminal Minds. Over the years, Tyler has remained open and transparent with her fans, even highlighting aspects of her journey with infertility. In 2014, she discussed her battle to conceive, admitting that there’s nothing wrong with walking away from the option of having a traditional family and choosing to have a vibrant career instead.
What is Aisha Tyler best known for?
Tyler was born in 1970, and by the mid-90s, she had embarked on her career in the entertainment industry. Her earliest roles were in television shows like The Pretender and Curb Your Enthusiasm. In 2001, she landed a role as the host of the talk show Talk Soup. While the show didn’t last long, it gave Tyler the opportunity to get noticed — and in short order, she was hired for other TV shows, including Friends and CSI: Miami.
Tyler has also acted in movies as well. According to IMDb, the actor has appeared in films such as The Santa Clause 2, Never Die Alone, Death Sentence, and Bedtime Stories. Tyler is probably best known for her work in the hit procedural series Criminal Minds. She has acted in nearly 100 episodes of the series and is a firm fan favorite.
What did Aisha Tyler say about her infertility journey?
Even as Tyler’s career in Hollywood has soared, her personal life has experienced its fair share of trials and tribulations. Most notably, Tyler has been open about her experiences with fertility. In a 2013 interview, Tyler admitted that she and her then-husband, Jeff Tietjens, struggled for years to have a baby. She revealed that once she went off birth control, she realized that it wasn’t going to be easy for her to get pregnant and that she had a tortuous fallopian tube, which makes it “very hard for a sperm to get to your egg.”
As reported by HuffPost, Tyler noted that they decided to try IVF. “After 40 your chances of getting pregnant are between 2 and 8 percent, and in my particular case they were less than 5 percent,” the Archer star said. Eventually, after a lot of procedures and a lot of money, Tyler said that she and Tietjens decided that it was time to stop trying.
“The hardest part is I really love my husband – he’s such a good person and he would be such a great father,” she said. “But we just decided it wasn’t worth it to go through that and so we decided to stop. It was better to not go through that torture.”
Aisha Tyler opened up about her choice not to have children
In 2014, Tyler once again talked about her infertility journey — and this time, she dove deep into her decision not to pursue IVF any further. As reported by HuffPost, Tyler admitted that “When we found out that (getting pregnant) was going to be difficult to impossible, it really was a choice to stop. I wanted families and couples to know that it was a valid choice not to get on this crazy merry-go-round of IVF and tens and tens of thousands of dollars.”
She also discussed how, in many cases, IVF isn’t affordable for those who want to have children. “We don’t focus on all the people that don’t do it,” Tyler said. “And I wanted people to feel- men and women- it’s okay to say, ‘I love my marriage, I love my life, I choose not to have children.'”
Three years later, in 2017, Tyler and Tietjens split after more than two decades together. As for her career, it is going better than ever, with her long-running role on Criminal Minds and multiple other successful projects.
