Abortion: still a dirty word

Last week, my boyfriend and I saw our friend's baby for the second time. The minute I saw the baby, I fell, in every way possible; fell down on the floor and babbled at him for an hour and a half, finally to be rewarded by that singular finger-gripped-by-tiny-fist routine and that priceless gummy smile. Then I went home with my boyfriend and watched EastEnders, from which I learned that having an abortion renders a woman "cold and empty" for ever more (Dot) and that even giving up a baby for adoption wreaks havoc with one's mental health (Sonia). I just knew that there was something in my back pages that I was supposed to be remembering now, probably "wistfully" and preferably tearfully, and just a little cerebral prodding shook it loose. My abortions! All five of them.

Exposure to Polly's breastfeeding, followed by Dot and Sonia's breast-beating, should by rights have launched me into a right royal depression, or at least a bit of "bittersweet" brooding over my barren terrain. But - and I examined my psyche closely for signs of self-delusion here - all I felt was happy to be home, alone, with my boyf.

But I didn't want to seem like a smug cow, so I said tentatively, "Isn't Louie gorgeous?"

"Bloody lovely - and he certainly liked you."

"I love babies," I said, surprised at the simplicity of my statement. And then immediately, perfectly naturally, "I'm so glad I had all those abortions."

Now, I know this is an unusual statement to make. Even EastEnders, which is ceaselessly condemned by the Daily Mail as being irretrievably "PC", has an amazingly censorious attitude to abortion. Think of key scenes featuring Carol, Bianca, Natalie, not to mention Dot's life sentence of sorrow. Yet I remember, as a child in the early 1970s, hearing Diane, the waitress heroine of the decidedly reactionary soap Crossroads, saying matter-of-factly to a miserably pregnant woman, "Abortion's not a dirty word, you know!"

Where did the recent creeping foetus fetishism come from? And how do we - excuse the phrase - get rid of it? Some of it must be blamed on Tony Blair's bowing of the knee to Rome. Cherie Blair can call herself a feminist all she likes, but any feminist worth her salt would have made a point of having a termination - on the NHS, naturally - when she got knocked up the last time. Wantonly giving birth to a fourth child on a planet buckling under the strain of overpopulation certainly isn't any sort of example to set for gymslip mums, who can at least plead ignorance and rampant fertility.

Me-Ism - psychiatry, psychoanalysis, any sort of navel-gazing - has to take part of the blame for the demonisation of abortion. The idea that everything we do or have done to us stays with us for ever is a reactionary and self-defeating reading of modern life. No doubt if you're the sort of lumbering, self-obsessed poltroon who believes that seeing Mommy kissing Santa Claus 30 years ago irrevocably marked your life, you wouldn't get over an abortion, as you wouldn't get over stubbing your toe without professional help. But you choose to be that way, because you are weak and vain, and you think your pain is important. Whereas the rest of us know not only that our pain is not important, but that it probably isn't even pain - just too much time on our hands.

The Good Birth lobby has to take some of the blame, too. Whenever a pop star has a caesarean, there's always some milch cow who calls herself a feminist popping up to tut-tut to the Mail that anyone who has the nerve to reject the blood, sweat and tears of natural childbirth (not to mention the honour of ending up with a vagina the size of the Channel Tunnel) is some sort of dysfunctional Barbie doll-wannabe, concerned only with the symmetry of her sex organs. Of course caesareans are "unnatural" but so is anaesthetic; would we seriously say relieving pain during any other life-threatening medical procedure robs the patient of a valuable experience? What a load of old eyewash!

The ever-growing emphasis on the inherent integrity of the "natural", no matter how well-meant, adds to the demonisation of modern abortion, which is nothing if not highly technical medical intervention. (When it's any good.) To be consistent, the anti-caesarean "womanist" should also be against the legal medical termination of unwanted pregnancies, favouring a return to the old days when "wise women" fed terrified girls dodgy roots and left them to get on with it.

In a recent Mori poll for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, only 7% of those asked about abortion declared themselves totally opposed to it, yet it remains the last taboo. Famous women would rather admit to having been sexually abused as children than to having had a termination - Cybill Shepherd and Barbara Windsor are the only ones I can think of who refer to theirs with good-humoured straightforwardness. "No woman takes abortion lightly," even the valiant pro-choice spokeswomen have taken to saying, not realising that they are adding to the illusion that abortion is a serious, murderous, life-changing act. It isn't - unless your life is so sadly lacking in incident and interest that you make it so.

Myself, I'd as soon weep over my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over those abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life - mine.

Today's best video

Today in pictures