“I beg you to see what it is that we must save, and not to let the bigots and misogynists take it away from us again.”
By Arwen Curry
September 13, 2023
The Journey That Matters is a series of six short videos from Arwen Curry, director and producer of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a Hugo Award-nominated 2018 feature documentary about the iconic author. In the first of the series, Elisabeth Le Guin and Caroline Le Guin reflect on “What It Was Like,” in which Ursula reads from her essay of the same name about the illegal abortion she had while studying at Radcliffe.
As young women growing up under the protection of Roe, we never really talked with our mother about her abortion. Elisabeth learned that it had occurred when she went through several abortions of her own in the 1980s; but what we know about the story of Ursula’s necessarily different experience comes to us through her written words, as it does to you. “The Princess” was her keynote address to NARAL Pro-Choice America in 1982 when Roe was not even a decade old, and this piece, “What It Was Like,” was a talk for Oregon’s NARAL chapter in 2004. These stories are public statements, performances of Ursula’s own life material as a means to inspire and transform. The second of them, which you are about to hear, is also a rather extraordinary public love letter to her own family.
Continued: https://lithub.com/watch-ursula-k-le-guin-on-her-illegal-abortion-in-1950/