Britney Spears says in new memoir she had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake

Britney Spears says in her new memoir that she became pregnant with then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake's child, and that the pair ultimately decided to get an abortion, according to an excerpt of the book published on People.com

Spears writes in her upcoming book, "The Woman in Me," that Timberlake had misgivings about the pregnancy, given their ages at the time, according to the excerpt obtained by People.

“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 wrote. “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.”

“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,” she said in the book.

Spears also described having the abortion: “To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”

TODAY.com has reached out to representatives for Timberlake, Spears and the book’s publisher for comment.

Spears began dating Timberlake in 1999, when she was 17 and he was 18. The pair split in 2002.

Spears has since had two children with ex-husband Kevin Federline, Sean, 18, and Jayden, 17, while Timberlake shares two sons, Silas, 12, and Phineas, 2, with his wife Jessica Biel.

The pop icon's memoir is set to publish on Oct. 24, and is described as a “brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope,” according to the book’s website.

In another excerpt from the book published by People, Spears said she started to feel like a "child-robot" under her 13-year conservatorship, where she was unable to make her own personal and financial decisions.

"I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” she wrote. “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.”

This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:

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