In an article published by Newsweek, TCA’s Ashley McGuire and Leigh Fitzpatrick Snead share how even women of fame and fortune aren’t immune to being victimized by societal pressures to abort, in an article titled, “Even Wealth and Fame Don’t Save Women From Abortion Pressure.” They write:

Even the richest and most famous women in the world aren’t safe from pressure to abort.

In her just-released memoir Britney Spears admits she got pregnant at the tender age of 19 while in a relationship with Justin Timberlake. She didn’t want to have an abortion. He, as she put it, “didn’t want to be a father.”

The pregnancy “was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy,” Spears wrote. “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.”

“If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it,” the singer continued. “And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”

It was a choice Spears felt pushed into: “To this day, it’s one of the most agonizing things I have ever experienced in my life.”

Britney Spears may feel alone in her pain, but she is far from it. A recent, comprehensive study of women who have had abortions found that the vast majority—two in three—felt pushed or even forced into it.

If Britney Spears, at the time and still to this day one of the most famous women in the world, can feel pushed into an abortion at the father’s “insistence” (as Reuters put it), what of ordinary women? And how much greater is the pressure on women who lack the material resources needed to carry and raise a child?

To read more of Ashley McGuire and Leigh Fitzpatrick Snead’s article, go here.