Hi everyone,
Over the weekend, an abortion rights group shared a clip of singer Stevie Nicks talking about how getting an abortion saved her career. She was in Fleetwood Mac at the time and the band was working on their third album.
The pro-abortion group Center for Reproductive Rights was all in, saying "This is a must watch! Stevie Nicks speaks openly about the abortion that allowed her to continue her career at the height of Fleetwood Mac’s rise. She makes it plain: access to abortion made her life, her art, and her voice possible."
"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 would have destroyed Fleetwood Mac," she said. She'd been using birth control, she had an IUD, but she got pregnant anyway. And she terminated that pregnancy.
For Nicks, being wealthy and successful was not a lifestyle into which she could have welcomed a child. She said it "would have been a nightmare scenario." The father of the child was Don Henley.
"I would have tried my best to get through, you know," Nicks said in the video, "being in the studio every single day expecting a child, but mostly having a child with Don Henley would not have gone over big in Fleetwood Mac... It would have been a nightmare scenario for me to live through."
She said she spoke out about her abortion because "somebody has to do something." But what struck me was that she intentionally chose a lifestyle of fame, fortune, and success instead of one that holds the greatest love that exists on this earth: the love of a mother for her child.
And it's tragic that she felt she could not embrace that child, accept that love, that despite all odds—she was on birth control, she was a drug user—came into her life.
She said abortion is what made her artistic success possible, but she never dared ask or imagine how much greater it could have been if she'd said yes to love and become a mother. Women in our culture are told repeatedly that there's something better in life than mothering a child. But the truth is there just isn't, there's nothing even close.
Libby