You Can Go Another Way: Stevie Nicks and the Enduring Immiseration of Abortion

Abortion makes you sad. It makes you angry. It makes women — especially — miserable.

According to my X feed, everyone in the world is currently talking about an interview from late last year when Stevie Nicks discussed her 1979 abortion.

She remains incensed that she got pregnant. She used an IUD and had “a great gynecologist” after all — “totally protected.”

She insisted that Fleetwood Mac would not have survived her having Don Henley’s baby. Her ex, Lindsey Buckingham, wouldn’t have been happy. It would have been a “nightmare” for her to live through having the baby. For the good of the music world, we are told to believe, her abortion was necessary, or even for the best.

The CBS Sunday Morning interview was making the rounds because the Center for Reproductive Rights was using it on social media, apparently unaware that Nicks does sound miserable about it. It doesn’t make the  excerpt, but in the video as it aired on CBS, Nicks said that the issue was personal and encouraged them to edit the section of the interview if they wanted:

I was reminded of something Dorothy Day wrote when she was 75. In it, she still had her own abortion on her mind, decades after going to confession for it:

God forgive us the sins of our youth! But as Zachariah sang out, “We have knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of our sins.” I don’t think anyone recognizes the comfort of this text better than I do. I have not yet been attracted by the present tendency to bring everything out into the light of day by public and published confessions. Were we not taught by Holy Mother Church to respect the modesty of the confessional? Or is that a silly expression? But oh the joy of knowing that you can always go there and be forgiven seventy times seven times. (Even though you wonder, in your distrust of yourself, whether you really mean or have the strength to “amend your life.”) I hope your readers can read between the lines from the above and recognize what my positions on birth control and abortion are.

At least Day was on the road to healing. She was not justifying and even lauding the death of her child through abortion deep into her seventh decade of life.

I pray that women who have seen the post from the Nicks interview know that there are resources for healing after abortion. The abortion could have been yesterday; it could have been 60 years ago; it could have been any amount of time. Some of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching sights I have seen are in a Sisters of Life chapel after a post-abortion healing retreat. A woman leaves a rose on the altar for each baby she has aborted — giving each child to God, and asking for His mercy on herself. Most of these women were coerced into the abortion one way or another. That’s simply the culture we live in. And for the women who are poor, who speak no English, who are black or brown, there is often a search-and-destroy mission underway among health care professionals.

The interview as the social media post presented it was a little spliced. In the fuller conversation, Nicks talks about how she had to speak out because no one was and she had a platform. Here, she wasn’t necessarily talking about the abortion from decades ago. She was referring to her 2024 song “The Lighthouse,” which was her response to Roe v. Wade.

“The Lighthouse” is pure abortion advocacy:

Some of the lyrics:

I have my scars, you have yours
Don’t let them take your power
Don’t leave it alone in the final hours
They’ll take your soul, they’ll take your power

Unless you stand up
And take it back
Try to see the future
And get mad
It’s slippin’ through your fingers
You don’t have what you had
You don’t have much time
To get it back

I wanna be the lighthouse
Bring all of you together
Bring it out in a song
Bring it out in stormy weather
Tell them the story

I wanna teach ’em to fight
I wanna tell ’em
This has happened before
Don’t let it happen again

“Poets write what they write,” Nicks said. “And poets should not be censored. Writers should not be censored. This song should not be censored. It should go out into the world and do what it’s going to do.”

Then Nicks said this: “There is a God. And God gave me this talent to sing and write and dance. So I’m doing my job.”

The Nicks interview is such a devastating window into our culture’s utter confusion about life and death and sex and men and women. Nicks at one points said that if she had chosen to be a mother, she would have been a good one.

Dorothy Day’s birthday was on Saturday. I pray Day might be able to talk with Nicks’ Guardian Angel and see what might be workable about healing. Because Nicks is a mother. She is a mother who had an abortion. And she could be a motherly influence on those who have had abortions or who are considering abortions right now, if she chose to be.