Stevie Nicks Explains Why She Takes the ‘Risk’ of Speaking Out About Abortion Rights
Stevie Nicks made her grand return in September with the release of “The Lighthouse,” a song inspired by the fight for abortion access following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. And in a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning airing Oct. 27, the star explained why she decided to champion a historically polarizing cause.
Related
When asked why she even took “the risk” of releasing “The Lighthouse” by correspondent Tracy Smith, Nicks was self-assured. “Because everybody kept saying around me, not to me, just around me, ‘Well, somebody has to do something,'” she told the program. “‘Somebody has to say something.'”
“And I’m like, ‘Well, I have a platform,'” she continued. “I tell a good story. So maybe I should try to do something. I was also there. I was, been there, done that.”
Nicks has previously been open about having sought reproductive care when she was younger. In a recent Rolling Stone interview, she reflected on getting an abortion in the late ’70s after getting pregnant by her “Leather and Lace” collaborator Don Henley.
“Don was the first guy I actually went out with after Lindsey [Buckingham] and I broke up,” she told the publication. “I go to my GYN, and he says, ‘Well, you’ve been protected by your Copper-7 IUD, but you have a tipped uterus. That IUD is only protecting half of you, and we didn’t know that.'”
“Now, what the hell am I going to do?” she continued. “I cannot have a child. 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.”
Women’s healthcare is one of the reasons the “Edge of Seventeen” singer is backing Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Shortly after Taylor Swift shared her endorsement of the Democratic candidate in September, Nicks wrote on Instagram, “As my friend @taylorswift so eloquently stated, now is the time to research and choose the candidate that speaks to you and your beliefs … Your vote in this election may be one of the most important things you ever do.”
Watch Nicks talk about the importance of supporting abortion rights below:
Hannah Dailey
Billboard
