In a new memoir out next week, Britney Spears says she had an abortion some 20 years ago.
On Tuesday, People Magazine published excerpts from the upcoming book in which Spears, now 41, writes about her abortion of Justin Timberlake’s child.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated,” she wrote in The Woman in Me. “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
“To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life,” Spears added. “If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
The pop star’s experience with abortion is far too familiar to millions of women. As Brenna Lewis wrote in these pages last year, “Widespread abortion regret is supported by data, yet seldom reported.”
The physical and psychological risks of abortion are well known to those of us who support post-abortive women. New studies have shown that women who have abortions are 81 percent more likely to experience subsequent mental health problems. This includes being 110 percent more likely to abuse alcohol and 115 percent more likely to develop suicidal behavior following
