An unexpected witness to the importance of protecting life.
An unexpected witness to the importance of protecting life
T he music video for Britney Spears’s “Everytime” makes so much more sense now. In her new memoir, The Woman within Me, the pop star writes about the abortion she was pressured into by her boyfriend and fellow Mickey Mouse Club star Justin Timberlake.
The official video was a bit confusing and violent, but with the backstory it makes all too much sense about the most intimate violence of abortion.
In the book, she reveals an innocence that was robbed from her. Her family life was volatile. She believed she was in love, and she had resources, and yet she felt she had to do what the young man in her life told her to do when she became pregnant.
“I was so in love with Justin, just smitten,” she explains in the book. “I don’t know if when you’re younger, love’s a different thing, but what Justin and I had was special. He wouldn’t even have to say anything or do anything for me to feel close to him.” She writes about how she and Timberlake would color-coordinate their outfits and big music events even though it was “tacky.” In a podcast that gave him a hard time about it,Timberlake even said, “You do a lot of things when you’re young and in love.” Spears notes: “And that’s exactly right. We were giddy, and those outfits reflected that.”
“At one point when we were dating, I became pregnant with Justin’s baby,” Spears writes. “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. Besides, what was done was done. 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.”
Timberlake didn’t want the press to find out, so he insisted, she writes, that she not go to a hospital for the abortion. So she had a chemical abortion at home.
“On the appointed day, . . . I took the little pills.” She remembers: “Soon I started having excruciating cramps. I went into the bathroom and stayed there for hours, lying on the floor, sobbing and screaming. They should’ve numbed me with something, I thought. I wanted some kind of anesthesia. I wanted to go to the doctor. I was so scared. I lay there wondering if I was going to die.” Most abortions today happen with pills at home. She describes in her book what most abortions in America look like today. She continues: “When I tell you it was painful — I can’t begin to describe it. The pain was unbelievable. I went down to the ground on my knees, holding the toilet. For a long time, I couldn’t move. To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”
“I kept crying and sobbing until it was all over,” Spears shares. “It took hours, and I don’t remember how it ended, but I do, twenty years later, remember the pain of it, and the fear. After that, I was messed up for a while, especially because I still did love Justin so much.”
That’s the experience of a girl who you would think would have all the resources in the world.
I pray that Britney Spears can appreciate what a blessing she has given women who have had abortions or who currently feel the pressure to abort their babies. She loves that child she never got to hold. Many women have the same experience but don’t have the outlet to express their pain or grieve. I don’t know that Spears would join the March for Life this year, but she has done something much more important. She’s shared her pain. She’s talked about something that is so raw and real, and that politics often curtails a real conversation or substantive debate about.
At the beginning of her book, Spears writes about escaping the chaos of her home — her father’s alcoholism and her parents’ constant fighting — in the woods of her Louisiana neighborhood. She had a deep appreciation for the warmth that was captured in a rock garden she would retreat to. Spears had an appreciation of being a creation of a Creator, and of His love for her. She felt an infused knowledge that, somehow, He had given her gifts that would bring her hope and purpose.
Celebrities are people, too. And Spears demonstrates courage in telling her story. Just as her book was coming out, I spoke at a law school in the South about life after Roe v. Wade. So many of the questions were hostile, based on an assumption that abortion is freedom — although the most irritating ones were from young men who supported abortion clearly because they want to use women for pleasure. The students who opposed abortion — because they want something better for women and children — whispered to me after the event. Spears, to my knowledge, doesn’t take a political position. She just shows love. She just shares her story. And looking back at her video for “Everytime,” you see a beautiful baby born at the end. The baby she longs for, still. May she and every woman who has been coerced into an abortion come to some peace.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.