In Lesser Choices (2022), the Los Angeles-based filmmaker Courtney Stephens interviews her mother, Estelle, as she recalls the experience of seeking an abortion in 1969. This was before the US Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973 and, of course, well before that decision was overturned in 2022. Like many women at the time, Estelle found her answer in a clandestine provider in Mexico City – a process that, to her, proved that she was ‘willing to do anything to not be pregnant’.
Stephens pairs the interview audio with Super 8 images of Mexico City, building a tension between the nostalgic, home-movie aesthetic and the traumatic memories recounted in their conversation. In doing so, she reveals two contrasting truths in her mother’s story: her fear of the process itself, and the freedom she found in choosing when, and on what terms, to grow her family. For more from Stephens, watch her short Ida Western Exile.
Directed by Savanah Leaf and Taylor Russell Directed by Jay Stephen and Ralph Briscoe When the future I’d been planning lay shattered at my feet, freezing my eggs offered a fragile hope
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