Britney Spears described her painful, emotional abortion experience in her newly released memoir, “The Woman in Me,” which became available on Tuesday.
The 41-year-old pop star previously told People Magazine that she hadn’t wanted to go through with the procedure but opted to abort her baby when her boyfriend at the time, fellow singer Justin Timberlake, decided he didn’t want to be a father.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” Spears wrote of getting pregnant. “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,” she added. “He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young.”
Spears started dating Timberlake in 1999 when she was 17 and he was 18. The abortion reportedly happened when Spears was about 19. They were a couple until 2002.
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“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” Spears wrote of deciding to get an abortion. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father. To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
As for the abortion, Spears described in detail how it felt in her memoir. “It was important that no one find out about the pregnancy or the abortion, which meant doing everything at home,” she wrote.
Because they were worried about the abortion being leaked to the press, only Spears’ assistant and family friend Felicia Culotta and Timberlake knew about the procedure.
The pop star wrote in the book that the process was “excruciating” and that she was lying on the bathroom floor “sobbing and screaming” after ingesting the abortifacient pills because “the pain was unbelievable.” She wrote in the book that Timberlake was with her, strumming his guitar to try to cheer her up.
“I kept crying and sobbing until it was all over. 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 wrote.