Stevie Nicks has opened up about getting an abortion in 1979 and revealed that if she decided otherwise it would’ve “destroyed” Fleetwood Mac.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee — who was in an on-again, off-again relationship with Eagles singer Don Henley when she learned she was pregnant in the late ’70s — told “CBS Sunday Mornings” that she had no idea how big the band “was gonna get” at the time.
“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 told correspondent Tracy Smith.
“So you took all the precautions?” Smith asked.
“Yes. And 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,’” Nicks replied.
Nicks said it wouldn’t have gone over well with the band had she been expecting a child with Henley, mostly due to her breakup with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham roughly two or three years prior.
“It would’ve been a nightmare scenario for me to live through,” she said.
Nicks has previously addressed the abortion after Henley shared that Fleetwood Mac’s 1979 song “Sara” was about what would’ve been their child.
“Had I married Don and had that baby, and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara,” she told Billboard magazine in 2014. “But there was another woman in my life named Sara, who shortly after that became Mick’s wife, Sara Fleetwood.”
She recently told Rolling Stone that she’d never “in a million years” hand over a baby to a nanny or be dragging them “around the world on tour.”
“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,” she told the magazine.
“So my decision was to have an abortion. If people want to be mad at me about that, I don’t really care, because my life was my life and my plan was my plan and had been since I was in the fourth grade.”
Nicks was inspired to write her new song, “The Lighthouse,” after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The singer, in her interview with “CBS Sunday Mornings,” acknowledged that it takes “some courage” to enter the debate around abortion and did just that when she remembered that she has a “platform.”
“I was also there. I was ‘been there, done that,’” Nicks said.