Britney Spears says she is pregnant with 3rd child

LOS ANGELES • Britney Spears on Monday announced she is pregnant with her third child, five months after a judge ended the controversial guardianship the pop icon said had barred her from having more children.

"I got a pregnancy test... I am having a baby," the 40-year-old said on Instagram. She did not provide a due date.

A Los Angeles judge in November dissolved the conservatorship long overseen by Spears' father - an arrangement the singer said had prevented her from having a contraceptive intrauterine device (IUD) removed, despite her desire for more children.

"I thought, 'what happened to my stomach?'" Spears wrote, saying that her 28-year-old partner Sam Asghari, whom she has started referring to online as her "husband", speculated she was "food pregnant".

"It's growing. If two are in there... I might just lose it," added the singer, prompting online chatter that she may be expecting twins.

After a highly public 2007 breakdown, when Spears attacked a paparazzo's car at a petrol station, the star was placed under a conservatorship headed by her father Jamie Spears. It lasted nearly 14 years.

Fans had long sounded the alarm that the ...Baby One More Time singer was unhappy with her father as her guardian. In June last year, she asked a Los Angeles judge to end the legal arrangement that she said had left her "traumatised".

Her allegation that the conservatorship was preventing her from removing a contraceptive IUD - despite her wanting to have authority over her own birth control in order to get pregnant - sparked outrage from reproductive rights groups and her fans, many of whom were already involved in the fervent #FreeBritney movement.

"I would like to progressively move forward and I want to have the real deal," Britney Spears told the court in a bombshell hearing last summer.

"I want to be able to get married and have a baby. I have an (IUD) inside of myself so I don't get pregnant. They don't want me to have children - any more children," she said during the gripping 20-minute statement.

The formal end to the guardianship in November last year came after Mr Spears was removed from his position in charge of her finances and estate at a hearing in September.

Britney Spears said on Monday that she "won't be going out as much" to avoid trailing paparazzi.

She is already mother to two teen sons, Sean and Jayden, with her former husband Kevin Federline.

In her post, she also opened up about struggles with perinatal depression during previous pregnancies, saying it was "absolutely horrible".

"Women didn't talk about it back then. Some people considered it dangerous if a woman complained like that with a baby inside her, but now women talk about it every day," the pop star wrote.

During the highly publicised apparent mental breakdown that followed her 2006 divorce and custody battle, Spears was captured in petrol stations barefoot and driving with one son in her lap.

She met Asghari in 2016 when they co-starred in a music video for her single Slumber Party. She announced their engagement on social media in September last year, but has yet to reveal a wedding date.

Ashgari also took to Instagram on Monday, saying that "fatherhood is something I have always looked forward to and I don't take (it) lightly. It is the most important job I will ever do".

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE