Stevie Nicks has spoken openly about having an abortion more than 40 years ago and admitted it would have been the end of Fleetwood Mac if she had decided to go ahead with the pregnancy.
In a new and candid interview with rolling stonewhere she also spoke about a previous conversation she had with Katy Perry, the 76-year-old singer revealed that she had an IUD when she became pregnant by her then-lover Don Henley and also said that she doesn’t care if people are mad at her for what she did .
When asked how she found the courage to speak out about this, Nicks revealed that if it were up to her, she would have kept it private, explaining, “Well, I didn’t really let mine out to the public; Don Henley let it out to the public.” .
“He called me to apologize. I said, “You know what, Don? We dated for about a year and we’re still very good friends. Leather and Lace ties us together forever,” he said, referring to their 1981 debut.
“So he let it out of the bag anyway.” I probably never would have done it. Why would I say anything about it? Everything was totally legal. It was like 1977, or going into 1978.
Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks has spoken openly about having an abortion more than 40 years ago.
Stevie became pregnant by Don Henley during their romance in the 1970s. They are pictured here in February 2017.
‘Don was the first guy I dated after Lindsey (Buckingham) and I broke up. When this pregnancy happened, I thought, “What the hell happened? I’m completely respectful of the rules of the world here, and suddenly this happens to me and I can’t understand it.”
“I go to my gynecologist and he says, ‘Well, you’ve been protected by your copper-7 IUD, but your uterus is tilted. “That IUD only protects half of you, and we didn’t know that,” Nicks recalled.
She went on to explain how she came to the decision that an abortion was the right option for her, as Fleetwood Mac was riding high after the release of their 1977 album Rumors.
‘Now what the hell am I going to do? I can’t have a child. “I’m not the type of woman who would hand my baby over to a babysitter, not in a million years,” she explained.
“So we’d be dragging a baby around the world on tour, and I wouldn’t do that to my baby. I wouldn’t say I only 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 abort. If people want to get mad at me for it, I don’t really care, because my life was my life and my plan was my plan and had been since I was in fourth grade.’
When asked if she was implying that Fleetwood Mac would have been “over” if she had decided to go ahead with the pregnancy, she replied: “Done.” And that would have been sad, because I wouldn’t have married Don Henley.
“That was a really fun relationship, but he was in a bigger band than me,” he said, referring to the Eagles.
Stevie said Fleetwood Mac would have been “over” if she had gone ahead with her pregnancy.
The singer, pictured here in 1979, previously said she has no regrets about having an abortion.
Stevie, pictured here in 2019, previously said she was “doing a lot of drugs” at the time she became pregnant.
“Those guys were rock stars, par excellence. Nobody in that band was prepared to get married and have children.
“So I knew it would all fall on me and I wouldn’t have even known what to do with that responsibility,” he added.
This isn’t the first time Nicks has revealed that she doesn’t regret having an abortion.
In 2020, she said the guardian: ‘There was just no way I could have had a child then, working as hard as we constantly worked.
‘And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs… I would have had to leave. And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal the hearts of many people and make them very happy.
‘And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There is no other band in the world that has two lead singers and two lead writers. That was the mission of my world.’
Stevie (born Stephanie) added: “If Christine (McVie) were in this room with me right now, I would tell you that we both made the decision not to have children and instead follow our musical muse around the world.” “It’s not my job, it’s who I am.”