The death of Stevie Nicks’ “hero” Ruth Bader Ginsburg has the songwriter worried about the future of women’s rights. In a new interview with The Guardian, she put the issue of abortion in personal terms, saying, “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac.”
Nicks terminated a pregnancy in 1979, while dating Don Henley of The Eagles. By bringing it up now, she wasn’t trying to claim that Fleetwood Mac would never have existed otherwise — after all, her procedure happened at the apex of the band’s post-Rumors fame. Instead, she seems to have been suggesting that Fleetwood Mac wouldn’t have turned into the cultural heavyweight it became, and Nicks wouldn’t have realized her potential.
Now, she’s concerned that Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg, Amy Coney Barrett, would roll back protections on women’s right to choose. “Abortion rights, that was really my generation’s fight,” she said. “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.”
Nicks explained how her personal decision enabled her to pursue her “mission.” She said,
“If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away. 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.”
Last month, Nicks penned a moving tribute to RBG, saying that while she never met the Justice, she wished she could “give her a huge hug and thank her for all she had done for women.”
Elsewhere in her interview with The Guardian, Nicks spoke about why she prefers to look every bit of 72 years old. “Oh God, the Botox,” she said. “Let me tell you, Botox only makes you look like you’re in a satanic cult. I only had it once and it destroyed my face for four months. I would look in the mirror and try and lift my eyebrow and go: ‘Oh, there you are, Satan’s angry daughter.’ Never again. I watch a lot of news and I see all the lady newscasters looking like Satan’s angry daughters, too.”
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She’s also open to the possibility of falling in love, even if she doesn’t think it’s likely. “I’m not going out with anyone. And I haven’t gone out with anyone in a long, long time. But I will say, I am always a romantic and I’m never averse to the fact that it is possible that you might turn a street corner and walk into somebody that just catches your eye, because it’s happened to me a million times. So, could I fall in love and run away with somebody at 72 years old? Yeah. It’s probably not gonna happen, but it’s possible.”
The twice-inducted Rock and Roll Hall of Famer has been busy on the music front, too. On October 21st through the 25th, Nicks’ 24 Karat Gold Concert Film will be available in select theaters. Recently, she and the rest of Fleetwood Mac have seen a resurgence in popularity after a viral TikTok video featured the classic song “Dreams”. It got so big that Nicks herself participated in the cranberry juice fun. Last week, she released her first solo song in almost a decade, “Show Them The Way” featuring Dave Grohl.
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