Stevie Nicks says that without her abortion, 'there would be no Fleetwood Mac'
A well-known American singer has joined a growing list of celebrities who have declared that the successful careers they have achieved would not have been possible if they had not had their pregnancies terminated.
Stevie Nicks, a member of the rock band Fleetwood Mac, credited her abortion with the success of Fleetwood Mac in an interview with The Guardian earlier this week. The interview focused on a wide range of topics, including the 72-year-old singer’s dating life, health concerns and her career.
After describing “abortion rights” as her generation’s “fight,” Nicks expressed concern that “if President Trump wins this election and puts the judge he wants in, she will absolutely outlaw it and push women into back-alley abortions.”
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Nicks went on to discuss an abortion she had in 1979, when Fleetwood Mac had reached the pinnacle of its success and she was in a relationship with The Eagles’ Don Henley. “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. 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. According to Nicks, the abortion was “really important” because “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 there “was not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers.”
In a 2014 interview with Billboard, Nicks was asked about the claim made by Henley that the 1979 Fleetwood Mac song “Sara” was named for the baby that she aborted. “Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara,” she acknowledged.
However, Nicks contended that the song was actually inspired by Sara Fleetwood, who was the girlfriend of the band’s British-born drummer, Mick Fleetwood, at the time. Nicks ultimately conceded that what Henley said about the song was “accurate, but not the entirety of it.”
Nicks and singer Lindsey Buckingham joined the band in 1975, which consisted of Fleetwood, bassist John McVie and pianist/singer Christine McVie, formerly known as Christine Perfect. Christine McVie and Buckingham have taken hiatuses from the band over the years and Buckingham was recently fired and replaced with Neil Finn from the British band Crowded House and Mike Campbell from Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.
Nicks joins several others who have declared that their careers would not have been possible without their abortion.
This week, Crystal Good spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee as a witness against the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. The graduate student at West Virginia University, small business owner and mother of three said, "Who I am today is only possible because at 16 years old, I had access to an abortion."
At the Golden Globes Awards in January, actress Michelle Williams argued that her career would not have been possible if she did not have the ability to “employ a woman’s right to choose.”
In 2017, actress Martha Plimpton described an abortion she had in Seattle as her “best one,” indicating that she had terminated multiple pregnancies.
At a pro-abortion rally in March, actress Busy Philipps promised that she would “never stop talking about my abortions” while actress Elizabeth Banks described “reproductive freedom” as “no less than liberty itself.”
In a 2018 skit on her short-lived Netflix program “The Break,” comedian Michelle Wolf suggested that abortion “should be on the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s” and declared “God bless abortions!” In a separate Netflix comedy special last year, Wolf recalled how having an abortion made her feel “powerful,” like God.
