Britney Spears: ‘agonising’ abortion after Justin Timberlake’s rejection of baby

Britney Spears opens up about her past experience with abortion after she discovered she was pregnant during her relationship with Justin Timberlake when she was 18 years old.

“I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I had anticipated," Spears states in her memoir, The Woman in Me. 

She expresses her former partner’s discontent with the pregnancy and that he didn’t want the baby. 

“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,” she claims.

The pop singer wrote about her abortion: “To this day, it’s one of the most agonising things I have ever experienced in my life.”

“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, like many others in her situation, seems to have been pressured into going through with the abortion despite it not being what she truly wanted. 

In an excerpt from her book, that has been shared with People magazine, she says that she didn’t “know if it was the right decision” and that if she hadn’t been influenced by the pressure from her former partner, she “never would have done it”.

Britney Spears’ abortion story is absolutely heartbreaking, and what makes it all the more disturbing is that it is not a rare occurrence in the slightest. 

A study led by Priscilla K. Coleman published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons in 2017 titled Women Who Suffered Emotionally from Abortion reveals that a harrowing but not surprising majority, almost three quarters, of American women who have had an abortion had only gone through with it due to subtle to substantial pressure being inflicted on them to have the abortion.

More than half of the women who had participated in the survey stated that the pressure they felt was so distressing that it strongly influenced their decision to abort. 

The survey involved 987 women, more than 58 percent of whom expressed that their decision to abort was as a means to keep the people around them happy. More than a quarter of survey respondents shared that they were worried about potentially losing their partner, had they not aborted their unborn baby.

The study highlights the reality of what campaigners call a woman’s choice. It is also shown that two thirds of the women surveyed expressed that they knew in their hearts that abortion was not the moral decision. More than 67 percent of the women stated that the decision to have an abortion was one of the hardest decisions of their lives.

Pro-abortion activists have been known to paint abortion as a women’s rights issue, in the sense that abortion should be easily accessible to women so that they can have control over their fertility. They claim that abortion empowers women, and is the only way for them to have a successful career or pursue an education, or lifestyle goals.

Although they claim that they are pro-woman and that they support a woman’s right to choose, pro-abortion advocates tend to steer clear of acknowledging the reality of the lasting negative physical and psychological impacts abortion has on some women. 

The brave women who come forward to tell the stories of their traumatic experiences of being forced into ending the life of their unborn children due to pressure from their partners, family or friends, should be heard and taken into consideration for those who still believe that access to abortion is there to help women.

President of the Population Research Institute, Steven Mosher, says “If a man tells a woman in so many words that he will leave her if she does not get an abortion, that woman is being denied the right to freely choose her—and her unborn child’s fate. The threat of abandonment is a very strong inducement to the woman not to carry her child to term.”  

  

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