Nicki Minaj: My Abortion Has ‘Haunted Me All My Life’

Philip Wegmann / December 31, 2014

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, rapper Nicki Minaj openly discussed her decision to have an abortion, a choice that she says has “haunted me all my life.”

While attending the prestigious LaGuardia Performing Arts High School in New York and dating an older man from Queens, Minaj discovered she was pregnant. “I was a teenager,” Minaj says. “I thought I was going to die.”

Now a multi-platinum superstar, Minaj says her decision to abort “was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through.” She’s still pro-choice, though, explaining that at the time: “I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have anything to offer a child.”

In “The Pinkprint,” an album critics have called her most personal work yet, Minaj raps about the decision. On the track “All Things Go,” she mourns that “my child with Aaron would’ve been 16 any minute.”

In a more raw mix-tape released before she signed with Cash Money Records, Minaj lyrically poured out her anguish and apologized to her unborn child.

Through emotion-driven rhymes, she raps, “Please baby forgive me, mommy was young, mommy was too busy trying to have fun,” and sings, “Wish I could touch your little face or just hold your little hand; if it’s part of God’s plan, maybe we can meet again.”

Georgette Forney, founder of the group Silent No More, identifies with Minaj and applauds “her vulnerability in sharing her pain.”

“I wish I could say that Nicki’s response was unique,” Forney tells The Daily Signal. “But many of us who have had abortions feel haunted by the loss and grief experienced afterward.”

Forney says she prays that Minaj finds peace and hopes that the star’s fans “heed her warning that some choices, like abortion, lead to a lifetime of pain.”