Nicks said that she was inspired to write the song a few months after Roe v. Wade was overturned. “Everybody kept saying, ‘Well somebody has to do something. Somebody has to say something,’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Well I have a platform. I tell a good story, so maybe I should try to do something.” The Supreme Court made the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and overturned it in 2022.
Nicks was experiencing incredible success as part of Fleetwood Mac in the late 1970s. She was romantically involved with Don Henley of the Eagles when she found out she was pregnant.
Before getting together with Henley, Nicks had been involved for years with her Fleetwood Mac bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. In 1979, Nicks aborted her child because she believed that being a mother would interfere with her career.
Nicks said that, prior to getting pregnant, she had decided she did not want to be a mother because she “didn’t want to have somebody have their feelings hurt all the time” and wonder where she was and when she would be coming back.
There were “many reasons” why having a baby would have destroyed Fleetwood Mac, said Nicks. She believes that one of them would have been the challenge of navigating a pregnancy while being in the band.
“Mostly, having a child with Don Henley would not have gone over big in Fleetwood Mac,” Nicks said. “With Lindsey and me…we had been broken up for two or three years. It would have been a nightmare scenario for me to live through.”
In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Nicks said of her abortion, “There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs. I was doing a lot of drugs…I would have had to walk away.”
“And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy,” she added. “And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.”
To those who criticize her decision to get an abortion, Nicks told CBS, “Well, I’d like to know, so are you just the few guys who are making the decisions for us?” That choice was hers, she said, “and you know what? If people want to be mad at me, be mad at me. I don’t care. Had I made the other choice, had I gone the other way, I’d have been a great mom. I went this way and I’ve done great.”
