RBG, ACB, and Stevie Nicks

B y Hollywood standards, Stevie Nicks is not especially politically outspoken, but there is one Washington figure who made a deep impression on her: the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. “She was my hero. She fought for me, and all women,” Nicks wrote on Twitter when the long-serving Supreme Court Justice succumbed to cancer last month. “She was a political rock star.” Nicks doesn’t specify what made Ginsburg her hero, but it isn’t hard to guess. In the eyes of the moderately well-informed citizen, Ginsburg equals “women’s rights,” especially abortion rights. Nicks has availed herself of this right four times.

Some women have no interest in becoming mothers, but that isn’t the case with Stevie Nicks: She did want to be a mother, very badly. Witness the gently horrifying soft-rock classic “Sara,” the only rock song I can think of in which the singer muses about having actually killed another human being. Neither Bob Marley nor Eric Clapton really shot the sheriff, but Nicks did kill Sara, and that’s what infuses the song with a delirium of regret. It was over a decade after the song appeared on the 1979 Fleetwood Mac album Tusk that the world learned, via Don Henley, that Nicks had conceived a child with him, named the child “Sara,” then had an abortion. In 2014, Nicks finally confirmed that Henley’s story, which he told in 1991, was “accurate.”

“Sara” isn’t just about abortion; in Nicks’s emotions, the destruction of her child got mixed up with thoughts about her close friend Sara Recor, who had begun an affair with Nicks’s sometime lover Mick Fleetwood and would go on to marry him, in 1988 (the pair later divorced). In effect, Nicks lost a friend, a lover, and a baby, all around the same time, and so “Sara” is a triple layer of loss and regret that floats from one form of pain to another. In its original form, the song ran 16 minutes and worked in references to the heartbreak of the other three band members as well. As it is, given the acknowledged basis in abortion, “Sara” contains some of the most vivid double entendres in rock history: “Wait a minute baby, stay with me awhile” sounds like someone having second thoughts on her way to the abortionist. As for, “There’s a heartbeat, and it never really died,” how Nicks ever manages to sing that line without crying, I do not know.

By naming her child, Nicks undermined the central talking point of abortion fans, which is that fetuses lack personhood and hence the “procedure” is no big deal, it’s even “health care,” which frames pregnancy as a disease. Nicks doesn’t see it that way. You don’t write a song as drenched in ache and sorrow as “Sara” about a “health-care procedure.” Notably, Nicks did not title the song “Clump of Tissue” and did not sing, “Clump of tissue, you’re the poet in my heart.” By giving her baby a name, Nicks acknowledged that what was inside her was a person, and yet she killed Sara anyway. Hence the woozy, ethereal disconnectedness of the song, the sense it gives of a woman pitifully unmoored from herself and broken down to such a degree that she must observe, over and over, “It doesn’t matter anymore,” as though trying to talk herself into the idea.

Nicks casually let slip in a 1992 interview in an obscure British music magazine named Vox, which is now defunct, that she had had four abortions in total. Celebrity interviewers being a craven lot — having worked at People magazine, I can tell you that showbiz journalists are primarily motivated by the fear of being blacklisted from access to celebrities by wrathful publicists should they ask a difficult question — nobody ever presses Nicks on the matter, and she has never written a memoir. But the Vox piece included this passage:

“To give up four (babies) is to give up a lot that would be here now. So that really bothers me, a lot, and really breaks my heart. But they’re gone, so…” she composes herself. “But I couldn’t because I was too busy. And I had all these commitments.” She wants to adopt, but age and single-parenthood are against her.

Her sense of loss is palpable in the writer’s observation that she had to compose herself. “It’s always been a tragedy. But [the fathers] understood,” Nicks told Vox. She added, “I’ve also thought about having one myself but I’m booked up for the next four years. I don’t know, at my age, if I can get pregnant right away, do an album at the same time, have a baby, promote the album, go on tour with the baby. So I’m going back and forth in my mind. At 43 years old, my time clock is ticking, so I can’t afford to wait around for very long.”

Now Stevie Nicks is 72 and will go to her grave having never had a child, because she was too busy. Here is where anyone who has read the news lately must wonder if Nicks’s role model should have been someone other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg. How about someone who lived her life like Amy Coney Barrett? Barrett is the model of a busy professional woman. She is a leader in her church and a devoted wife. She has taught Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, Federal Courts, and other classes, rising to the rank of full professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School. She researched, wrote, and published many lengthy academic papers. She served on the Advisory Committee for the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. She served as the faculty adviser to the Notre Dame Law Review, was a member of the American Bar Association’s self-study committee, and did much more volunteer work. She even served on the university’s parking committee. Then she went on to be a judge for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

She had accomplished all of this by age 45, and by that age she had somehow made time for seven children, two of them adopted and one of them with Down Syndrome. Like Nicks, and unlike Ginsburg, she believes that a fetus is a person, which is why she chose not to abort Benjamin, her youngest, when she learned during pregnancy that he would be born with a chromosomal defect. Nicks was too busy for one child while holding a part-time job that involves writing and recording a few songs a year and at its most strenuous stage involves twirling around onstage with a tambourine for two hours, about four times a week. And at no point did Nicks ever take a gig as onerous as serving on a university parking committee.

There can be no doubt that the life of a rock star is a challenging one — sometimes you have to get up before noon, even — but Nicks, and every other woman who wants a baby but considers herself “too busy” with career stuff to entertain the idea, should look to Barrett as an example of how life expands to make room for more possibilities than you can imagine. Choosing another direction, Nicks — and millions of women whose stories are similar to hers — has instead had to grow old knowing that she has missed out on “a lot that would be here now.”