The decision to have her first child was one of the major change’s in 24-year-old [Lauryn] Hill’s life. Many in the music industry advised her to have an abortion, but Hill resisted the pressure. It was a choice she never regretted, and a quandary she details in the song To Zion (video below).

“That song,” she says, “is about the revelation that my son [Zion] was to me. I had always made decisions for other people, making everybody else happy, and once I had him that was really the first decision that was unpopular for me. It was one that was based on my happiness and not what other people wanted for me or for themselves.

Jackson isn’t the first recording artist to explore the controversial subject of abortion in song. It has also surfaced in the work of Neil Young, Madonna, Sinead O’Connor, and Lauryn Hill, among others. In “Abortion Papers,” Jackson approaches the matter carefully (and ambiguously): rather than presenting a dogmatic political perspective, he personalizes it through the story of a conflicted girl raised in a deeply religious home and her Bible-admonishing father. In his notes for the track, Jackson wrote, “I have to do it in a way so I don’t offend girls who have gotten abortions or bring back guilt trips so it has to be done carefully…. I have to really think about it.”

“I keep having these children…. I don’t know if I’m the most fertile woman in America.” ~ Singer and actress Lauryn Hill who recently announced she is pregnant with baby #6, OK! Magazine, June 7 [Photo via 411mania]