Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amy Coney Barrett & Stevie Nicks

By 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.”

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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By 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.”