Pop icon Britney Spears in her upcoming memoir, The Woman in Me, has opened up about undergoing an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake in the early 2000s. In the book, Spears also provides her personal account of what drove her to infamously shaving off her hair, and she describes her 13-year conservatorship in detail.
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Weeks before the release of her anticipated memoir, excerpts from Britney Spears’ tell-all have revealed the pop icon’s personal account of undergoing an abortion during her three-year relationship with NSYNC singer Justin Timberlake.
In the published excerpts, Spears opens up about her relationship with Timberlake, highlighting that she had expectations of building a future together and that falling pregnant during their time together initially did not raise concerns for her.
Spears adds that she only went through with the abortion after reaching an agreement with her then-boyfriend Timberlake, who, in Spears’ account, felt that they were not ready to be parents at their then-young age – the couple were eighteen and nineteen when they first started dating, and their relationship spanned three years.
People published the following quote from Spears’ memoir:
“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.”
Justine Timberlake has not made any comments on Spears’ account, as of yet.
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In her memoir, Britney also provides a personal account of infamously shaving off her hair in a ‘public breakdown’ in 2007 – the moment was captured and released by over 70 photographers, and made worldwide headlines.
Spears connects the breakdown to her experience of coming under scrutiny from those closest to her, painting the breakdown as backlash at the tight grasp her family had on her creativity, her freedom and her image as a young girl.
Spears’ memoir sheds light on her 13-year-long conservatorship that started in 2008 – a period during which she describes feeling stripped of her autonomy and self-worth, adding that she felt like a “child-robot” during the experience with no control over her image or her finances.
A quote published by People reads:
“Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick … I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself … The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time.”
Britney’s memoir, The Woman in Me, is set to hit shelves on October 24.
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