Nicki Minaj has opened up about a life-changing event from from her teenage years.
In her cover story for the new issue of Rolling Stone, the “Anaconda” rapper discussed getting pregnant while enrolled at LaGuardia High School of Music & Performing Arts in New York City and making the choice to end the pregnancy.
The rapper revealed she got pregnant from her relationship with an older man who is described as her “first love.” When she found out she was expecting, she recalled her reaction as, “I thought I was going to die.”
“I was a teenager. It was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through,” Minaj added.
She also admitted that her decision to have an abortion has “haunted me all my life.” But she doesn’t regret the choice she made, because she feels it was the right one for her at the time.
“It’d be contradictory if I said I wasn’t pro-choice,” she said. “I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to offer a child.”
Minaj first opened up about the experience in a song included on a mixtape called “Autobiography,” which she said “she didn’t expect anyone to hear.”
The 32-year-old also addresses the loss of a child on the track “All Things Go” on her new album “The Pinkprint.”
In All Things Go she raps about her wishes for her younger brother Micaiah ‘Caiah’ Maraj and wonders what her child would have been like. In the lyrics, Minaj – whose real name is Onika Tanya Maraj – rhymes: ”I want Caiah to go to college, just to say we did it. My child with Aaron would have been 16 any minute / so in some ways I feel like Caiah is the both of them / It’s like he’s Caiah’s little angel, looking over him.”