Stevie Nicks says Fleetwood Mac would have been ‘done’ without 1977 abortion

Stevie Nicks thrust herself into the ongoing fight for access to abortion in the US because she had “been there, done that”, the legendary singer-songwriter says in a new interview.

“I tell a good story,” Nicks remarked in an interview conducted by CBS News Sunday Morning, a clip of which was circulated by the network in advance.“So maybe I should try to do something.

“I was also there.”

Nicks’ comments come after the release in September of her new single The Lighthouse, which was inspired by progressives’ battle to reinstate federal abortion rights in the US.

She wrote the rock song after three US supreme court justices appointed by the Donald Trump White House voted to essentially overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that gave Americans a constitutional right to an abortion.

In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Nicks discussed her certainty that if she had not gotten an abortion in the 1970s, it would have marked the end of the renowned band Fleetwood Mac that she ultimately helped launch to rock immortality.

Nicks at the time had a contraceptive intrauterine device but nonetheless became pregnant with singer Don Henley after breaking up her prior relationship with Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, she told Rolling Stone. She said she decided to terminate the pregnancy in about 1977, or going into 1978, as Fleetwood Mac sat atop the world after its album Rumours.

Rumours won Fleetwood Mac the Grammy for album of the year in 1978, a year that saw the band play 18 live shows in 11 US states. Three of the album’s singles – Go Your Own Way, Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun – reached the top 10 on the charts. Dreams, with Nicks’ vocals, went No 1 as Rumours eventually finished seventh on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

“Now what the hell am I going to do?” Nicks said to Rolling Stone about her thought process at the time of her aborted pregnancy. “I cannot have a child. 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.”

Nicks said she doesn’t “really care” if people become upset with her over having decided to get an abortion. “My life was my life, and my plan was my plan and had been since I was in the fourth grade,” Nicks said to Rolling Stone, adding that Fleetwood Mac would have been “done” if she had decided otherwise.

Nicks’ remarks to Rolling Stone about her personal experience with abortion elaborate on ones she delivered to the Guardian in 2020, when she said: “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly.”

Meanwhile, after the reversal of Roe v Wade as Trump set his sights on a second presidency in the 5 November election, Nicks said she heard everywhere around her that “somebody has to do … [and] say something” to support abortion rights.

“And I’m like: ‘Well I have a platform,’” Nicks said after CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Tracy Smith asked the singer about the courage needed to “step into the waters of the abortion debate”.

The result was The Lighthouse, a rare new release for Nicks, whose last album of entirely fresh material was put out in 2011. The single casts her as a lighthouse guiding women to campaign for their rights as voters choose between Kamala Harris and Trump, whose supporters include a conservative thinktank that is urging him to step up attacks against sexual and reproductive health and rights.

“They’ll take your soul, take your power, unless you stand up, take it back,” Nicks sings on the track. “Try to see the future and get mad/It’s slipping through your fingers, you don’t have what you had/And you don’t have much time to get it back.”