Thanks to America This Week, I’ve been on a top-ten kick of late. Novels, movies, songs, TV shows… There’s something satisfying and exceedingly challenging in trying to narrow such broad fields down to your ten favorites. Not the ten best, mind you—that’s a thoroughly impossible task—but favorites is at least manageable. I’ve tried to rope in friends and family, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (which reminds me, I need to rank drinks next). My ten favorite novels are fairly conventional. Lots of classics. They are, in no particular order: The Three Musketeers, Tom Sawyer, Les Miserables, That Hideous Strength, The Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, Pride & Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Rings, and East of Eden. There’s a good chance we share some in common, which is more than can be said of my songs list.

Coming up with my ten favorite songs, it turns out, was a far more difficult task. I’ve read hundreds of novels in my 50 years, but I’ve heard thousands of songs. And how do you rank hymns or worship songs against radio fare? I don’t think you reasonably can, so I limited the field to pop songs. My first pass yielded roughly 25 contestants. To move forward, I axed everything less than 30 years old. Sorry, “Lullaby.” Sayonara, “Some Nights.” My apologies, “All Too Well.” That took me down to 15 songs, then 12, and finally… ten. In the end, my entire list is comprised of songs released between 1984 and 1987, but didn’t include anything by Prince, Madonna, Hall & Oates, or even the King of Pop. In other words, these songs weren’t chosen for their objective merit or overall popularity. They were chosen because they transport me back more than any others, and three of them are almost too poignant to even listen to. 

Conventional wisdom says we’re all drawn to the music of our early teens, but in my case it was earlier—which must speak to my incredible maturity. I was eight years old in 1984. Pop music wasn’t exactly on my radar (or radio), but then my older cousins came to town for the Summer Olympics. At 15 and 17, they were the epitome of cool, and so was their music. For two weeks I followed them around my grandparents’ winter home in Newport Beach, which was essentially my home every summer. And what a home it was, though the reception was rather dismal—especially in the guest bedrooms. They were blocked by a cliff to the east and by three stories of house to the north. If you wanted to listen to the radio, your best bet was the garage, which happened to be on the top floor. I would spend a lot of time in that garage over the next few years, beside my beloved dual-cassette boombox. The last two songs to miss the cut came from that summer, before I even had a radio of my own. Namely, “I Love L.A.” and “Cruel Summer” (which happens to be featured in one of my top-ten movies), but 1984 still managed to land one hit on my top-ten list (after the songs of summer had gone). 

Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer” may be the least controversial choice on my entire list. It has to be among the most played tracks in the world, but it’s actually Don Henley I want to talk about. Along with his daughter Sara—and her mother, Stevie Nicks. You may have seen mention recently of Nicks’ abortion—which occurred sometime in the late seventies. It was used this month by the Center for Reproductive Rights to celebrate abortion. “Access to abortion,” they tell us, “made [Nicks’] life, her art, and her voice possible”—and they included a clip from an interview she did last year with CBS’s Tracy Smith to drive the point home. Having a baby, Nicks confidently declared “would have destroyed Fleetwood Mac.” Why? According to Nicks, it wasn’t the demands of pregnancy in general. It was that pregnancy, in particular. Because while she thinks she could have endured being in the studio every day as an expectant mom, her bandmates—specifically Lindsey Buckingham, her erstwhile lover—could not have endured her carrying Don Henley’s baby. “It would have been a nightmare scenario for me to live through,” Nicks concluded, and so their child wasn’t allowed to live at all.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing for National Review, noted last week that Nicks’ interview is not quite the slam-dunk for abortion the Center for Reproductive Rights makes it out to be. The clip opens, in fact, with an admission the abortion industry normally works hard to suppress. Stevie Nicks had “a great gynecologist,” she tells us, and an IUD. She was “totally protected”—or so that gynecologist led her to believe. “How [could] this [have] happened?” she asks indignantly. Hadn’t she done everything she was supposed to do? Yes and no. The use of birth control does result in dramatically fewer pregnancies, so long as it doesn’t alter the frequency of intercourse. But the use of birth control always alters the frequency of intercourse. That’s the rub. There are things you can do to increase or decrease the likelihood of conception, but in the final reckoning, it is wholly beyond your control. Which is why God prescribes only two options when it comes to sex: marriage or celibacy. Our petulant rejection of both is why millions upon millions of innocent human beings have been casually torn to pieces in the womb. It’s the price we pay for demanding a third way.

I can find no indication as to how Don Henley felt about Nicks’ pregnancy, but it was Henley who first made the abortion public. That in itself is telling. Women who don’t reveal their personal abortion history don’t generally want others doing it for them. Especially women who are world famous. So Henley was either incredibly naive—which I don’t think he’s ever been accused of—or he was intentionally trying to stir the pot. Even the strange framing of Henley’s revelation may have been a calculated effort to cause pain. “To the best of my knowledge,” Henley told Christopher Connelly in a 1991 GQ interview, “(Stevie Nicks) became pregnant by me. And she named the kid Sara, and she had an abortion.” To the best of my knowledge… What does Henley mean by that? Is he saying that maybe Nicks didn’t get pregnant, didn’t name their child Sara, and didn’t have an abortion? No, he seems to be implying that Nicks may have gotten pregnant by someone else, which is hardly a flattering conjecture when you consider the nature and length of their relationship. Henley would go on to assert that Fleetwood Mac’s song “Sara” was written "to the spirit of [their] aborted baby” and believes the “build your house” line was a reference to him.

Nicks denied the allegations at first, calling it wishful thinking on Henley’s part, but if you look at the lyrics, it’s not hard to see where Henley was coming from. “Sara” is a song that is initially about a man—a singer, in fact, who rides the wings of a storm. “I think I had met my match,” Nicks croons, which seems apropos since Henley was the singer for perhaps the only band in the world that was even bigger than Fleetwood Mac. And that, apparently, is how they met, during the summer of 1976, when Fleetwood Mac opened for the Eagles at several stadium shows. But then the song shifts and Nicks starts singing to a “Sara” who she describes as “the poet in my heart,” whose heartbeat “never really died,” who she hopes is still dreaming. Was there a born Sara somewhere in the world that Nicks’ could have reasonably spoken of in these terms? Not likely.

“Wait a minute, baby. Stay with me awhile.” That’s how “Sara” opens, and it’s hard to know whether Nicks is addressing her lover, or a literal baby who she fears won’t be with her long. “But now it's gone,” Nicks continues, “it doesn't matter what for.” Here again, she could be referring to the “sea of love” she was drowning in or to an aborted baby. Or even both. The first time Nicks sings, “When you build your house, then call me home,” it seems to be addressed to a lover—which is how Henley interpreted it. But after the focus shifts to “Sara” and Nicks keeps singing that same line over and over, it betokens to me a different house. And a different home. The one Jesus spoke of in John 14. 

Stevie Nicks would concede decades later that Don Henley’s assertion about “Sara” was essentially correct. “Had I married Don and had that baby,” she told Billboard in 2014, “and had she been a girl, I would have named her Sara.” Isn’t it interesting that a self-avowed feminist like Stevie Nicks would mention marriage here at all? She could have easily left the “married Don” part out altogether. But she seems to know, despite herself, how God intends this whole thing to play out. It also leads me to believe that Nicks and Henley probably did talk about getting married. But one or the other, apparently, was unwilling to tie the knot. Years later, Nicks would amend her story again. “I [could] not have married Don Henley,” she rationalized, “he was in a bigger band than me [and] nobody in that band was ready to get married and have children.” But the band was ready to break up entirely, it turns out.

Lydia Harvey asserted in a 2014 piece for the Tampa Bay Times that “There's only one place perfect enough for a baby created by Stevie Nicks and Don Henley, and sadly for us mortals, heaven (if you believe in it) is exactly where that unborn child has been all this time.” I’m sure Harvey meant well, but this is greeting-card sentimentality—shared by Christians the world over who use the imagery of heaven to justify their indifference to the violence of abortion. Like all of us, Stevie Nicks and Don Henley are profoundly broken people. They would not have had a perfect child, but they did have a child. And that child was killed for a host of vacuous reasons that only get worse with age. “If I had not had that abortion,” Nicks told the Guardian in 2020, “I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac”— ignoring the fact that the band’s best days (and their GRAMMYs) were already behind it when the abortion took place. 

Stevie Nicks ostensibly aborted her baby to save a band that was splintering and spare the feelings of bandmates she could barely tolerate. When asked in the Guardian interview if Fleetwood Mac got along, or were friends, or ever saw each other when they weren’t touring, her answer to all three was an emphatic, no—which she says had been the case since 1976. And yet, this band, Nicks argued had to be held together because “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… That was my world’s mission.” A band that hated each other, teaching the world how to love. Do you see the irony? And in her determination to never need a man, Nicks exposed herself completely to being used by men. Before they joined Fleetwood Mac in 1975, Nicks tells of toiling as a waitress and cleaning lady to pay for the apartment she shared with Lindsey Buckingham because Buckingham—who could’ve “play[ed] four sets (a week) at Chuck’s Steakhouse [for] $500”—refused to sell out. 

Meanwhile, Don Henley was enduring something of the same thing in his own world—the disintegration of the band he headlined along with a drug-fueled meltdown that he barely survived. In 1980, paramedics were called to Henley’s Los Angeles home where they found a naked 16-year-old girl who’d suffered a cocaine-induced seizure. Henley claimed not to have known she was underage and says he’d only called for a sex worker "to escape the depression [he] was in.” That depression has always been credited to the breakup of the Eagles, but I can’t help but wonder if Nicks’ abortion was also a contributing factor. The timeline certainly fits, and I know from the testimony of Kelsey Grammer, another 70-something celebrity (and sometimes wearer of Abort73 T-shirts) who also lost a child to abortion in the 1970’s, that abortion regret can be just as bitter for the father. "I know that many people do not have a problem with abortion,” Grammer wrote in his new book, “and though I have supported it in the past, the abortion of my son eats away at my soul.” 

Stevie Nicks’ first solo album released in 1981. Henley’s followed a year later. And just like that, two of the biggest bands in the world, linked by a single abortion, suddenly found themselves full of members all looking to go their own way. Fleetwood Mac would limp on for a few more years, but with all three singers pursuing solo careers, the writing was on the wall. I’m not saying that Nicks’ abortion is responsible for all the carnage that ensued, but there’s no denying that the lives of Stevie Nicks and Don Henley both spiraled out of control in the years to follow. Nicks was doing so much cocaine in the early 80’s, she told Billboard, that a doctor warned her that just one more line might cause a brain hemorrhage. There were corollary culprits, to be sure, but to blithely assume that the abortion was a non-factor is rather obtuse.

“I'd have been a great mom,” Nicks proclaimed in her CBS interview. If she hadn’t had her daughter killed, that is. That’s not how she sees it, I’ll grant, but ignorance can only be an excuse for so long. Eventually Stevie Nicks will face a judge far more discerning than those who work for CBS or the Guardian. A judge who will rightly discern her degree of culpability. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul repay man according to what he has done?

At one point in his 1991 GQ interview, Don Henley speaks of seeing a father and his young daughter Christmas shopping together and getting all choked up. Was her name, Sara, perhaps? Having no siblings or cousins of his own, Henley had a sudden longing for family but then rationalized, according to Connelly, that it would be “irresponsible to bring a child into this screwed-up world.” Nicks took something of the same tack in claiming to have had the abortion for the good of her child. “I am not the kind of woman,” she told Rolling Stone, “who would hand my baby over to a nanny, not in a million years.” I wouldn’t do that to her. So she handed her baby over to an abortionist instead. When Nicks was asked last year whether she ever regretted not having a child, she answered “never” before the question was even finished—a response that was far too quick and unequivocal to be plausibly honest. Here’s her explanation:

I knew then that I had to [remain] in Fleetwood Mac, a huge band that was on its way to being legendary, to be able to be the lighthouse. Not only did [my abortion} allow me to follow my dream of being this rock & roll woman, but it allowed me to be this person that just wrote this song. I wanted to write something that would be helpful in this situation, because this could be my finest hour. This could be the most important thing I’ve ever done, this song.

The song in question—the most important of her career, apparently—is 2024’s “The Lighthouse,” which she boasts of having written in a single morning. And it sounds like it. “Abortion rights,” Nicks tells us, “was really my generation’s fight.” She was “so happy” when abortion was legalized in 1973 but now urges women in song to be angry and afraid as they fight the fascists. Here’s a sampling, which somehow manages to ape both Michael Jackson and Troy Bolton:

You've gotta get in the game
You've gotta learn how to play
You've gotta make a change, you've gotta do it today

All the rights that you had yesterday
Are taken away
And now you're afraid
You should be afraid
Should be afraid

Because everything I fought for
Long ago in a dream is gone
Someone said the dream is not over
The dream has just begun, or
Is it a nightmare?
Is it a lasting scar?
It is, unless you save it
And that's that
Unless you stand up
And take it back

Not surprisingly, “The Lighthouse” cannot be found amongst Nicks’ most-popular songs—not by a Landslide. “Edge of Seventeen” has been listened to 600 million times on Spotify; “The Lighthouse” clocks in at 1.6—which is still an absurdly high number for a recording of this… quality. Though you may think I’m still quoting song lyrics, Nicks declared in last year’s Rolling Stone interview that she is the lighthouse because she is the wisdom—along with Kamala Harris (yes, she actually said that). “We are the women that [shine the light]… we bring the ships in so they don’t crash… we save lives every day”—which calls to mind something spoken by the prophet Isaiah. Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.

As outspoken an abortion apologist as Stevie Nicks has become, it’s worth remembering that she hid her abortion for decades and would still be hiding it today had she not been outed by the father. “[Don Henley] let that one out of the bag,” Nicks conceded last year. “I probably would’ve never (made it public). Why would I say anything? Everything was totally legal.” But that’s a strange argument to make. You hide things that are illegal. You don’t hide things that are legal—especially ones you purportedly celebrate—unless you’re actually ashamed. Unless your professed enthusiasm for abortion is not what you pretend it to be.

Don Henley, who has dedicated much of his life to the preservation of Walden Woods said in a decades-old interview with Whoopi Goldberg that “mankind should live in harmony with nature and not try to conquer it.” Since Henley has also reportedly donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party, he clearly doesn’t apply this maxim to the issue of abortion. Because abortion is the antithesis of living in harmony with nature. It is emphatically anti-nature. Abortion enters nature’s most sacred and protected space and turns what is supposed to be the cradle of life into a chamber of death. Henley is critical of Civil War memorials, which he calls “monuments to violence,” but if you want a true monument to violence, look no further than your local Planned Parenthood. Their nefarious business model is right in the name. The children who aren’t planned, they kill.

When Henley suggested to GQ that it would be irresponsible to bring children into the world (which may be the single most asinine assertion in a world full of asinine assertions), he wondered aloud, “And where would [I] raise a child? Not in Los Angeles, certainly…“ Not in that cesspool. But here’s the thing. I grew up in Los Angeles, at the same time Henley’s daughter would have grown up. And you know what, it was pretty great. Despite being an only child. Despite having a dad who left, my life in the City of Angels was more than enough. Had Sara Henley been born, she would have driven the same streets as I did and listened to the same music. She may even have gone to the same school. And I bet she would have loved it—no matter how dysfunctional her parents were. Because life is infinitely preferable to the alternative. 

Don Henley, it turns out, got married in 1995. Thirty years later, he’s still married with three grown children—who were all raised in Texas, just like their dad. The man who once morally eschewed the bearing of offspring now calls his family the most important thing in his life. That doesn’t mean I’m a fan of his politics, but that is worth celebrating. Meanwhile, the most important thing in Stevie Nicks’ life, you’ll remember, is the song she wrote to shill for abortion. “I am a totally free woman,” Nicks gushed to the Guardian, “and I am independent, and that’s exactly what I always wanted to be.” But the other word for being entirely free and independent is… alone. A prisoner of her own device, which is the saddest fate of all. Stevie Nicks has spent a lifetime trying to convince herself that she’s better off without children, but I suspect she’d renounce all her rhetoric for the nonsense it is, if she could only get her Sara back.