She spoke, along with the wife of the governor of Oregon

Le Guin, best-selling author of “The Left Hand of Darkness” and many other novels, said she had an abortion as a young woman, and has been a strong supporter of abortion rights ever since.

Like Oberst, she said it’s difficult to convey the deep changes that occurred for women over the three decades since Roe v. Wade, the federal case that legalized abortion. She compared being pregnant and 20 years old in the 1950s to living under fundamentalist Islamic law.

If she hadn’t disobeyed the law and had the abortion, Le Guin said, she never would have went to college or met her husband as the two were sailing on a ship for England as Fulbright scholars.

“I would have been an unwed mother with a 3-year-old in California,” she said, most likely living off her parents and “unmarriageable. Another useless woman.”

That means her three wanted children would never have been born, Le Guin said, choking up. “I can’t bear the thought.”