Britney Spears has revealed that she had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake.
The pop superstar also said the controversial conservatorship she was under left her feeling “stripped me of my womanhood”.
In extracts from her upcoming memoir The Woman in Me, published by People magazine, Spears writes of the abortion: “For me, [the pregnancy] 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.
"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 … 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 and Timberlake were together between 1999 and 2002.
Spears, 41, writes: “To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life."
In passages from the book, published by People magazine, the US singer talks about how “shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back” because she had been “eyeballed so much growing up”.
The 41-year-old also says she felt “never good enough” for her father Jamie Spears and him being in charge of her freedom and finances from 2008 during the legal arrangement made her “feel sick”.
Usually reserved for the very ill or conservatorship, the conservatorship was terminated by a judge in Los Angeles after 13 years in November 2021.
Spears writes: “I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.
“If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out.”
The Woman in Me will be published on October 24th. - Additional reporting from Press Association
