Loose Women panellist Coleen Nolan has revealed that she had a secret abortion at the age of sixteen.

Nolan’s autobiography is currently being serialised in The Mirror and in it she admits that she fell pregnant shortly after joining her older sisters in their band ‘The Nolan Sisters.’

‘Intuitively I’d known I was pregnant,’ she said. ‘I woke one morning to a strange feeling of nausea, and in the back of my mind was the niggling reminder that I had lost my virginity to my boyfriend Robin Smith, the keyboard player in our band, four weeks earlier and we hadn’t used anything.’

Robin supported her decision to have an abortion and arranged for Coleen to see a doctor in Harley Street.

Coleen still believes that she made the right choice that day:

‘I wasn’t doing it lightly and knew it was something I could never go back on, but it was the right thing to do,’

While she waited to have the operation, the TV played the new video for her song Attention To Me.

‘That was the first time I cried. It was a lovely, happy, family song and here I was sitting in a hospital room, unbeknown to my family, waiting to have an abortion,’ she wrote.

Coleen, split up with Robin two years later, and went on to have two sons with actor Shane Richie and one daughter with her current partner, but says she still thinks about the child she might have had, who would now be 28.

Her biography, Upfront And Personal, will be published by PanMacmillan on May 1.