By Kyle Smith
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
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.”
“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.”
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