No one should have to run this gauntlet

MOST women think long and hard before having an abortion. I know, because a decade ago I had one myself. It was one of the most traumatic decisions I’ve ever had to make. My husband and I had one little girl already, and we were desperate to give her a sibling. We’d already been through the emotional upset of a miscarriage, so when I got pregnant again we were both nervously hoping for the best.

Sadly, though, when we went for a scan at 13 weeks, we were told the baby had an extremely rare condition which meant it was highly likely to die before birth, or during labour. If it had survived, we were informed it would most probably be paralysed, deaf, blind and unable to speak.

All these years later, I can remember the desolation we both felt – and the conviction we shared that the kindest course of action was to terminate the pregnancy.

We informed the hospital, but were distraught to learn that we’d have to wait two weeks for the operation. British law requires two doctors to sign a certificate permitting an abortion. Hospital staff told us a surprising number of doctors were reluctant to do so.

When I pressed them on why, they told me it was partly because some were reluctant to expose themselves to the wrath of a growing antiabortion movement. Hence the delay.

In the end, we did manage to secure the termination with only a week’s wait. But it was the longest seven days of our lives, as we wrestled with the emotional turmoil of what had happened.

Even as I was waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect outside the operating theatre, the consultant compounded my sense of loss and guilt by offering me advice on contraception, in the mistaken belief that I was a teenage mum and this was an unwanted pregnancy, despite my medical notes making very clear my circumstances. A kindly nurse made him apologise the minute I came to after the operation.

So yes, I found having an abortion hugely upsetting. And I can only imagine how much more difficult it would have been if I’d had to run the gauntlet of protesters, questioning my decision, issuing me with misleading advice about the medical risks of terminating, showing me gruesome pictures of aborted foetuses, or comparing abortion to the Holocaust.

Because this is what many women are forced to endure, as we found while making the Channel 4 Dispatches investigation.

I confronted one of the protesters, a woman named Justyna, who is paid by the Good Counsel Network and who stands outside an abortion clinic in South-West London day in, day out.

I asked her why she was giving misleading medical advice to women. Two women she urged to continue with their pregnancies had been advised by doctors to abort because their own lives were potentially at risk. Justyna told me that doctors aren’t always right.

But when I asked her about her work for the GCN, she accused me of harassing her – this from someone accused of harassing women at their most vulnerable. It really was the most grotesque of ironies.

How can this happen in a nation where, for good reasons, we have the right to choose how we control our own reproductive systems?

In several countries around the world, abortion in any circumstances is illegal. In parts of America, women’s reproductive rights are being dramatically curtailed.

Now the same campaigners who have had such success curbing those freedoms across the Atlantic are bringing their tactics over here. And a man who has said women who have abortions should be ‘punished’ is closing in on the US presidency.

If I found it agonising getting an abortion a decade ago, my heart goes out to the women today, here and around the world, whose basic rights are being violated.

Gruesome pictures and cries of ‘Holocaust’