Earlier on Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the long-standing case that protected a pregnant woman’s right to choose to have an abortion. Many, many artists chimed with their opinion on the ruling, with almost all being against the ruling. Cyndi Lauper has taken things a step further.
In 1993, Lauper released “Sally’s Pigeons,” a song inspired by a real-life incident where the pop singer’s friend got a back-alley abortion after becoming pregnant and died due to the attempted procedure. Last month, after the Court’s ruling was leaked to Politico, Lauper headed back into the studio to record an acoustic version of “Sally’s Pigeons.”
Here’s what Cyndi Lauper had to say about the new version:
“The Supreme Court’s radical decision today makes the re-recording and re-release of ‘Sally’s Pigeons’ more relevant than ever. In my childhood, women didn’t have reproductive freedom and 50 years later we find ourselves in a time warp where one’s freedom to control their own body has been stripped away. When I wrote this song with Mary Chapin Carpenter in 1991, we wrote about two little girls who dreamt of stretching their wings like the pigeons they watched that flew above them. They dreamt of being free. But freedom then for women and unfortunately now comes at a big price. If we don’t have control over our own bodies then we have no real freedom. We are second class citizens. We need to mobilize. We need to let our voices be heard.”
