REBECCA*, 26

When Rebecca chose to have an abortion last year, her biggest fear was that there would be protesters outside the Marie Stopes clinic.

“I was terrified,” she says. “My husband shielded me from them, but one woman tried to block the door with rosaries. She kept saying ‘don’t do this’. There was also another woman holding a poster with a two-yearold child and a sixweek foetus on it, and shouted ‘love both’ in a very non-loving voice.

“It hadn’t been an easy decision for me, as I grew up Catholic,” she says. “We’d only been married a few months, and my husband and I both felt we needed to be much more financially secure before we had a child. It was a really difficult choice to make, but being judged about it made it even worse.”

Rebecca was also terrified of the procedure – “I have a phobia of doctors and had no idea what to expect” – so seeing the posters of dismembered foetuses was incredibly tough.

“It was scary and all added to the anxiety I was having about it. My husband was furious on my behalf.

“It was like standing outside a hospital showing people pictures of open heart surgery. There was no way that their presence would have made me reconsider, but it did make everything that much harder.”