Britney Spears says she had abortion at Justin Timberlake's urging

In her memoir due out next week, pop star Britney Spears says that two decades ago, she had become pregnant by her former boyfriend, singer-actor Justin Timberlake, and at his urging had an abortion.

“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” Spears, 41, writes in “The Woman in Me,” due out Oct. 24 from Gallery Books, per an excerpt Tuesday in People magazine. “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, she adds, “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 underwent an abortion, writing, "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 went on to say, “To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life."

Spears and then-*NSYNC boy band singer Timberlake began dating in 1999, when she was 17 and he 18, as their careers were beginning to accelerate. They broke up in 2002.

The “Toxic” Grammy Award winner went on to marry dancer Kevin Federline in 2004, and the two had sons Sean, 18, and Jayden 17, before having their divorce finalized in July 2007. Her brief, previous marriage to a childhood friend, Jason Alexander (not the actor), had been annulled. Spears currently is separated from model-actor Sam Asghari, whom she married on June 9, 2022; he filed for divorce two months ago. In May 2022, Spears announced the couple had suffered a miscarriage.

A representative for Timberlake, who has two children with his actor wife Jessica Biel, did not respond to a Newsday request for comment. Spears has not commented further publicly.