Pop star Britney Spears revealed that she reluctantly had a secret at-home abortion after conceiving a child with N*SYNC singer Justin Timberlake, who made it clear that he did not want her to keep the baby.
Spears described the at-home abortion she had as a regrettable and torturous experience for her in her new memoir, The Woman in Me, according to a report by TMZ.
“I’m sure people will hate me for this, but I agreed not to have the baby. I don’t know if that was the right decision. 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,” Spears wrote in her memoir.
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE — Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake during the monologue on February 2, 2002 (Mary Ellen Matthews/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
Spears and Timberlake decided that the singer would kill their unborn child at home, without a doctor or family around, because it was important to them that no one find out that she had ever been pregnant.
“It was important that no one find out about the pregnancy or the abortion, which meant doing everything at home,” the pop star wrote.
The “Oops!…I Did It Again” singer went on to describe the procedure as “excruciating,” revealing that the at-home abortion medication caused her intense physical pain.
Spears said she remembers lying on the bathroom floor, sobbing for hours, while Timberlake tried to comfort her with music by strumming his guitar.
“I kept crying and sobbing until it was all over,” Spears wrote. “It took hours, and I don’t remember how it ended, but I do, twenty years later, remember the pain of it, and the fear.”
Spears and Timberlake eventually split up in March 2002. After that, the pop star had two sons, Sean and Jayden, with her second husband, Kevin Federline. Then, in 2008, after a public breakdown, Spears was placed under a conservatorship that was largely controlled by her father, Jamie.
During a court appearance in 2021, Spears told a judge that the conservatorship “stripped me of my womanhood” and “made me into a child,” because it was preventing her from removing a contraceptive IUD, and she wanted the ability to conceive a child.
The conservatorship that controlled Spears’ life for 13 years eventually ended in November 2021. Last year, the singer reportedly became pregnant again with her third husband, Sam Asghari, but later announced that she had suffered a miscarriage. In August, Asghari said he and Spears were getting a divorce.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.