Nicki Minaj Shares Her Abortion Story in Rolling Stone Magazine — Some Encouraged, Some Offended

Nationwide — Superstar rapper/singer Nicki Minaj is being both praised and criticized for publicly sharing her abortion story in the January 2015 issue of Rolling Stone Magazine.

During the interview, she admitted that when she was 16 years old, she got pregnant and ultimately she decided to have an abortion. She comments, “I was a teenager. It was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. It haunted me all my life.”

But despite her decision, she also admits that: “It’d be contradictory if I said I wasn’t pro-choice. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to offer a child.”

In a recent column on BET.com, writer Kellee Terrell says, “I’m extremely glad that she didn’t stay silent. For starters, while a handful of Black celebs have talked about having abortions (Vanessa Williams and Sherri Shepherd come to mind), it’s rare that young Black celebs speak out. And largely, the public narrative around who has accessed this safe and legal (depending on where you live) medical procedure, has been centered on white women — further perpetuating this notion that abortion is a white woman’s issue and that they are the only ones who are deeply impacted by the current war on women.”

She adds, “With Minaj opening up about her experience, she has helped other women to know that they are not alone. There is no shame. For many, this is just life.”

But not everyone is happy about it

Many say that Minaj, by sharing personal stories like this and through her provocative music, is encouraging teenage sex… and now abortions if pregnancy happens.

The problem, they say, is that statistics have long confirmed that African-American women have the highest abortion rates in the U.S.

In fact, according to a 2013 Guttmacher Institute report, Black women are four times more likely to have an abortion compared to their white women counterparts. The stats don’t like! 41 in every 1,000 pregnancies among Black teenage women (ages 15-19) are terminated compared to just 10 in every 1,000 among white women. For Latinas, the numbers are just 20 in every 1,000.

Nicki Minaj, although pro-choice, wrote about her abortion and the pain she still feels from it in her song, “Autobiography” – which was on a mixtape she released back in 2014.

Her newest album, The Pinkprint, was released in December 2014 and sold 244,000 copies in it’s first week.