Halsey is revealing that they felt “shame” from others for getting pregnant while young and unmarried, especially when their career is so hot.

“I’m 26, and I tried very hard for this pregnancy, and it was like, I’m financially independent, I’m pretty far along in my career, it feels like the right time for me to do it,” Halsey,  who is a new mom to baby Ender with boyfriend Alev Aydin, told Zane Lowe during a recent interview on Apple Music 1.

I’m 26, and I tried very hard for this pregnancy, and it was like, I’m financially independent, I’m pretty far along in my career, it feels like the right time for me to do it,” Halsey told Zane Lowe during a recent interview on Apple Music 1, as reported by Entertainment Tonight.

“And I got treated like a teen mom a lot of the times, where people were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re so young, and you have so much to do in your career, and you’re not married and you’re this.’ And it triggered all of these feelings of shame from when I was younger,” they recalled. “It triggered a lot of old feelings of shame in me where I was like, how can you have an opinion, that kind of opinion on me making this decision?”

Halsey revealed that they felt like they would have received blowback if they waited to be a later-in-life mom. “But then, there’s also, ‘She worked too hard, she never had a family. She’s going to die alone. She was too obsessed with work, she never found someone.’ ‘It’s a shame she’s not going to have any kids, her career’s not going to hold her at night.’”

Realizing they were going to take heat no matter what, Halsey said, “So f–k ’em and I just was like, I’m going to do what I want to do. You know what I mean? I was like, this is important to me.” Halsey has been open about how they suffered a miscarriage in 2015, and later went on to have surgery to deal with endometriosis, a condition where tissue that normally lines the uterus grows outside instead.

Halsey tried to stay off social media while pregnant with Ender. “The consequences were too high. The consequences of letting social media stress me out or cause me grief. It’s no longer just me being affected by it. There’s a whole other person whose nervous system is being affected by the status of mine. So, I had to kind of make that choice.” Halsey and Alev welcomed healthy baby Ender on July 14.