Stevie Nicks has released a new single, “The Lighthouse,” currently being celebrated by all the usual suspects as an “anthem” to abortion rights, female empowerment, and individual freedom. The song was purportedly written shortly after the U. S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade two years ago, and Nicks has been working to “perfect” it ever since.
Musically, it’s a tedious affair, with Nicks singing the same three notes, falling within the melodic range of a fourth, for most of its monotonous, plodding, 5-plus minutes. Visually, Nicks is depicted in almost religious terms — there are a few fleeting flashes of an area behind her that looks, alternately, like a church and a surgical area — as some sort of goddess or prophetess, a wise and experienced older woman ready to dispense the truth today’s young women so sorely need.
The video for the song opens with several definitions of “lighthouse” (“guide,” “beacon”) overlaid on a scene of waves crashing against rocks. Then the camera zooms in on an actual lighthouse, and what do you know, there is Nicks inside the lighthouse lamp, dressed in black, swaying back and forth, long blonde hair flying in the wind as she prepares to guide today’s young women away from the darkness of personal responsibility and into the freedom of sexual license.
The rest of the video shows various images of pro-abortion demonstrators, women marching for “rights,” and the like. A particularly chilling moment depicts a beautiful, young pregnant woman bathed in soft light and playing violin while her exposed, bare belly displays the words “MY CHOICE.”
In contrast with the song’s radical pro-abortion theme, Nicks gave an interview to Vox in 1992 in which she seemed to express some abortion regret:
“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.”
Nicks goes on in the interview to ponder whether she might still have a child.
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.
Nicks is now 76. The clock has ticked all the way down, and she is still childless. Do the abortions still bother her? Apparently not enough for her to counsel young women to think deeply about a decision that will take the life of one person and forever and irreversibly alter their own rather than head to the abortion facility as soon as they can.
Instead, the lyrics of “The Lighthouse” plead with those young women to fight for what Nicks thinks has been taken from them. She tells them to “stand up,” “take it back,” “get mad,” “get in the game,” “learn how to play,” and “do it today.”
But a few passages in the song that seem to refer to what Nicks sees as a loss of women’s freedom to get an abortion (which, it should be said, is patently ridiculous) could just as easily refer to something else. She sings of having “scars,” of a light going out, of life being “forever changed,” of “nightmares” and a “dream” dying.
What if those words were written about a baby instead of the right to abort that baby? Maybe, in some way, they were.
Nicks has publicly indicated that one of her abortions ended the life of a child she conceived with Don Henley: “If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac … 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. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important.”
Somehow, Ms. Nicks, I think the world would have survived without Fleetwood Mac. But what might that child, and your other children, have brought to your life, and to the world? Tragically, we’ll never know.
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