Stevie Nicks says Fleetwood Mac would have been 'destroyed' if she hadn't had an abortion
"It would've been a nightmare scenario for me to live through."
Stevie Nicks is speaking from personal experience when she defends a woman's right to choose.
With her latest single, "The Lighthouse," the iconic singer-songwriter wades back into the fight for abortion access, something she discussed in a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning. Emphasizing the importance of women having options, Nicks opened up about her own surprise pregnancy, which came on the heels of Rumours, her 1977 blockbuster album with Fleetwood Mac, when the group was achieving massive fame.
"I got pregnant and it was like, 'Why? I have an IUD. I am totally protected. I have a great gynecologist. How come this has happened? What the heck?'" Nicks recalled. "I'm like, 'This can't be happening.' Fleetwood Mac is three years in. And it's big. And we're going into our third album. It was like, 'Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.'"
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At the time, Nicks had ended her relationship with her Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham and was dating Eagles singer Don Henley. She said having the baby with Henley would have "destroyed" Fleetwood Mac for more reasons than one.
"I would've, like, tried my best to get through, you know, being in the studio every single day expecting a child," she told CBS Sunday Morning. "But mostly, having a child with Don Henley would not have gone over big in Fleetwood Mac, with Lindsey and me — we had been broken up for two or three years. It would've been a nightmare scenario for me to live through."
She added that ultimately she felt the choice was hers to make. "And you know what? If people want to be mad at me, be mad at me," she said. "I don't care. Had I made the other choice, had I gone the other way, I'd have been a great mom. I went this way, and I've done great."
Nicks also addressed her decision in a new Rolling Stone profile, in which she explained her thought process behind it. "'Now what the hell am I going to do? I cannot have a child,'" she recalled to the outlet. "I am not the kind of woman who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years. So we would be dragging a baby around the world on tour, and I wouldn't do that to my baby. I wouldn't say I just need nine months. I would say I need a couple of years, and that would break up the band, period. So my decision was to have an abortion."
Nicks would go on to cement her place in music history with Fleetwood Mac before reaching new heights as a solo artist.
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The singer has long been an outspoken advocate for reproductive rights, and expressed a similar sentiment back in 2020, when she advocated against the re-election of former president Donald Trump. "Abortion rights, that was really my generation’s fight," she told The Guardian. "If President Trump wins this election and puts the judge he wants in, she will absolutely outlaw it and push women back into back-alley abortions."
Turning to her own experience, she stressed how important it was that she had the opportunity to be in charge of her body and terminate the pregnancy. "There's just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly," she said. "And there were a lot of drugs. I was doing a lot of drugs… I would have had to walk away."
She added, "And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people's hearts and make people so happy. And I thought, 'You know what? That's really important. There's not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers.' That was my world's mission."