Britney Spears Reveals She Had an Abortion While Dating Justin Timberlake

Britney Spears‘ highly anticipated memoir, The Woman in Me, comes out next week, but some bombshells from the book have dropped early. One securely kept secret that Spears reveals is that at 19, she became pregnant with then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake‘s child, though she ended up having an abortion.

According to People, the pair found out that Spears was with child in 2000, when they were both 19 years old. The stars had begun dating a year prior. In the memoir, Spears says that it was Timberlake who wanted to have the abortion.

“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,” Spears writes in the book. “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, Spears says she has questioned the decision to terminate the pregnancy. “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.

“To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life,” she adds.

A rep for Timberlake did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.

Spears and Timberlake would remain together until 2002. In 2005, Spears would have her first child with then-husband Kevin Federline.

More revelations and excerpts were revealed today as well, with Spears detailing why she shaved her head in 2007 and going into details about her conservatorship.

“Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues,” she writes. “No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”

From Rolling Stone US.