In the 1970s, Stevie Nicks found out she was pregnant, which she was not prepared for. “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?'” the Fleetwood Mac star told CBS Sunday Morning during a recent interview. When she found out about the unexpected pregnancy, she was at an important point in her music career. Having a a baby would’ve “destroyed” Fleetwood Mac, she said during the interview.
Stevie Nicks is sharing her abortion story and advocating for reproductive rights because she has “been there, done that.” She had an abortion in 1979 because of an unexpected pregnancy that occurred when she thought she was taking the proper precautions to avoid getting pregnant. She had an IUD.
“I’m like, ‘This can’t be happening,'” she told CBS Sunday Morning, describing the moment she found out she was pregnant. “‘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.'”
At the time, Stevie had broken up with Lindsey Buckingham, her former partner who was also in the band. She had started dating musician Don Henley. This is part of the reason having a baby at that time would’ve been “a nightmare scenario.”
“I would’ve, like, tried my best to get through, you know, being in the studio every single day expecting a child,” Stevie explained. “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.”
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In addition to the complicated nature of her relationships at the time, Stevie also didn’t want to bring a baby with her on tour because she knew it would not be good for the child. She also didn’t want to hire someone to take care of her child for her, she explained during an interview with Rolling Stone.
“I am not the kind of woman who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years,” she told the publication. “So we would be dragging a baby around the world on tour, and I wouldn’t do that to my baby.”
Having a baby would’ve required her to take a break for a significant amount of time. “I wouldn’t say I just need nine months,” she explained. “I would say I need a couple of years, and that would break up the band, period.”
How other people perceive her decision to have an abortion is not super important, because it was the right decision for her at the time. She knows that she would’ve been a good parent — but she believes that that was her choice to make.
“If people want to be mad at me, be mad at me. I don’t care,” Stevie told CBS Sunday Morning. “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.”
Speaking to Rolling Stone about her decision to have an abortion at the time, she explained that, “My life was my life, and my plan was my plan and had been since I was in the fourth grade.”
Her latest song, “The Lighthouse,” is about women’s rights and abortion access, which she felt compelled to raise awareness of because she has firsthand experience and the platform to do so. “Everybody kept saying, ‘Well, somebody has to do something. Somebody has to say something.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I have a platform. I tell a good story. So maybe I should try to do something.'”
