Britney Spears has released some excerpts from her upcoming memoir, The Woman In Me, including details of a decision to have an abortion while she was dating Justin Timberlake.
People reports that Spears recounts that during her highly-publicized relationship with *NSYNC star Timberlake, she became pregnant with his child, but went through with an abortion because she claims he wasn't ready to be a father.
“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy," Spears writes. "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."
Spears adds that she doesn't think she would have gone through with the termination if the choice was solely up to her.
"I don’t know if that was the right decision," she writes. "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."
Other excerpts from the book published by People include Spears admitting that her fame made her feel robotic, losing a sense of what it felt like to be human.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot — a sort of child-robot," she writes. "I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself. 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.”
She also discusses the 2007 meltdown she had in public that resulted in her impulsively shaving her head. She describes it as an act of rebellion against the restrictions and expectations placed on her and her body.
"I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager," she remembers. "Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back. But under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take."
The Woman In Me is set for release on October 24.