Stevie Nicks Advocates for Women’s Right to Choose in New Single “The Lighthouse”

Stevie Nicks passionately advocates for a woman’s right to choose based on her own life experiences.

In her powerful new single, “The Lighthouse,” the legendary singer-songwriter reenters the conversation surrounding access to abortion, a topic she openly addressed in a recent interview with CBS Sunday Morning. During the interview, Nicks highlighted the critical significance of women retaining autonomy over their reproductive choices, drawing from her own unexpected pregnancy during the height of Fleetwood Mac’s fame following the release of their iconic 1977 album, Rumours.

“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 recalled, expressing her disbelief. “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.'”

At that pivotal moment, Nicks had recently ended a tumultuous relationship with her Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham and was involved with Eagles vocalist Don Henley. She candidly expressed that having a baby with Henley would have been catastrophic for Fleetwood Mac, complicating both personal and professional dynamics.

“I would’ve, like, tried my best to get through, you know, being in the studio every single day expecting a child,” she told CBS Sunday Morning. “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.”

Ultimately, Nicks felt that the decision was hers to make, firmly standing by her choice. “And you know what? If people want to be mad at me, be mad at me,” she stated defiantly. “I don’t care. 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.”

Nicks elaborated on her decision in a new Rolling Stone profile, providing insight into her thought process during that tumultuous time. “‘Now what the hell am I going to do? I cannot have a child,'” she recalled explaining. “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. So my decision was to have an abortion.”

Nicks would go on to secure her legacy in music history alongside Fleetwood Mac while also achieving remarkable success as a solo artist.

The singer has consistently been a vocal advocate for reproductive rights and reiterated a similar stance in 2020 when she spoke out against the re-election bid of former president Donald Trump. “Abortion rights, that was really my generation’s fight,” she told The Guardian. “If President Trump wins this election and puts the judge he wants in, she will absolutely outlaw it and push women back into back-alley abortions.”

Reflecting on her personal journey, Nicks emphasized the vital importance of being in control of her body and making the choice to terminate the pregnancy. “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly,” she explained. “And there were a lot of drugs. I was doing a lot of drugs… I would have had to walk away.”

Nicks further articulated, “And I knew that 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 I thought, ‘You know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers.’ That was my world’s mission.”