On Wednesday, More4 broadcast Travels with My Camera — A Matter of Life and Death, a “personal journey” by the journalist Miranda Sawyer. This was heralded by a piece in The Observer, written by Sawyer, explaining the purpose of her quest.

Sawyer’s dilemma has been that, until recently, she had been a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying, pro-choice feminist. After the birth of her son last year, however, she began to have doubts about the ethics and logic of abortion. “I was calling the life inside me a baby because I wanted it,” she wrote, after visiting picketed abortion clinics in America. “Yet if I hadn’t, I would think of it just as a group of cells that it was OK to kill. It was the same entity. It was merely my response to it that determined whether it would live or die. That seemed irrational to me. Maybe even immoral.”

Later she explained that: “When you’ve experienced . . . pregnancy and birth, and the fantastic beauty of the resulting child, it’s hard not to question what a termination does, or is.” In a nutshell, since becoming a mother, Sawyer has found herself — while still ultimately agreeing that women should be able to have abortions — becoming more troubled by the pro-life argument.

It’s odd, because, since I had children, I’ve found myself becoming much less troubled by the pro-life argument. Of course, that echoes that old, black-humoured mum joke, often heard in playgrounds on wintry February afternoons — “What do you think should be the cut-off point for terminations?” “I dunno. Secondary school?” — but also reflects how many issues still remain within the abortion debate.

Last year the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams wrote a wholly clear-headed and admirable piece examining why women always felt compelled to preface discussion about their abortions with an obligatory “Of course, it's terribly traumatic, no woman enters into this lightly”. She went on to explain that this is because, however liberal a society is, it assumes that, at its absolute core, abortion is wrong, but that a forgiving State must make legal and medical provision for it, lest desperate women do a Vera Drake down a back alley and make things even worse.

Abortions are never seen as a positive thing, as any other operation to remedy a potentially life-ruining condition would. Women never speak publicly about their abortions with happy, relieved gratitude, in the same way that they would about, say, leaving an abusive partner — despite the fact that this impacts much, much less on their lives than an unwanted child. There are no “Good luck with your morning-after pill!” cards. People don’t make jokes about it — despite the fact that all the truest jokes are about vexed topics and cover every other subject, including cancer, death and God. Yet however much a single, childless woman isn’t encouraged to discuss her positive abortion experience, this pales in comparison with mothers who then have abortions. Our view of motherhood is still so idealised and misty — Mother, gentle giver of life — that the thought of a mother subsequently setting limits on her capacity to nurture, and refusing to give further life, seems obscene. Just as mothers must pretend that they love other people’s children, never wish to be violent or get hog-whimperingly drunk, wear a cowboy hat and ride one of those mechanised rodeo bulls, so they must pretend that they are loving and protective of all life, however nascent or putative it might be. They should, we still quietly believe, deep down inside, be prepared to give and give and give, until they simply wear out. The greatest mother — the perfect mother — would carry to term every child she conceived, no matter how disruptive or ruinous, because her love would be great enough for anything.

I have problems with that assumption. For one thing, I believe something very elemental and, in the most academic sense, nonChristian. One of Sawyer’s biggest postmotherhood dilemmas over abortion was trying to work out where “life” begins with a foetus, and concluding that if abortion could occur before “life” begins, that would be a “right” kind of abortion. But given that both science and philosophy continue to struggle to define what the beginning of “life” is, wouldn’t it be better to come at the debate from a different angle entirely? For if a pregnant woman has dominion over life, why should she not also have dominion over not-life? This is a concept understood by many other cultures. The Hindu goddess Kali is both Mother of the Whole Universe, and Devourer of All Things. She is life and death. If women are, by biology, commanded to host, shelter, nurture and protect life, why should they not be empowered to end life, too? I’m not advocating stoving in the heads of children, or encouraging late abortions — but then, no one is. What I am vexed with is the idea that, by having an early abortion, a woman is somehow being unfemale and, indeed, unmotherly. That the absolute essence of womanhood and maternity is to sustain life, at all costs, whatever the situation.

My belief in the ultimate sociological, emotional and practical necessity for abortion did, as I have mentioned before, become even stronger after I had my two children. It is only after you have had a nine-month pregnancy, laboured to get the child out, fed it, cared for it, sat with it until 3am, risen with it at 6am, swooned with love for it and been reduced to furious tears by it that you really understand just how important it is for a child to be wanted. And, possibly even more importantly, to be wanted by a reasonably sane, stable mother. Last year I had an abortion, and I can honestly say it was one of the least difficult decisions of my life. I’m not being flippant when I say it took me longer to decide what work-tops to have in the kitchen than whether I was prepared to spend the rest of my life being responsible for a further human being. I knew I would see my existing two daughters less, my husband less, my career would be hamstrung and, most importantly of all, I was just too tired to do it all again. I didn’t want another child, in the same way that I don’t suddenly want to move to Canada or buy a horse. While there was, of course, every chance that I might eventually be thankful for the arrival of a third child, I am, personally, not a gambler. I won’t spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high.

Ultimately, I don’t understand antiabortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. I don’t understand why pregnant women — women trying to make rational decisions about their futures — should be subject to more pressure about preserving life than, say, Vladimir Putin.

However, what I do believe to be sacred — and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole — is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world. Or a child that, through no fault of its own, would be the destructor of a marriage, a family, a parent. It’s fairly inarguable to say that unhappy children, who then grew into very angry adults, have caused the great majority of mankind’s miseries. If psychoanalysis has, somewhat brutally, laid the responsibility for mental disorders at parents’ doors, the least we can do is to tip our hats to women aware enough not to create those troubled people in the first place.

In short, while I am now packing something just short of the contraceptive equivalent of Trident, if I ever did have to have an abortion again, I would like to think that it would be something unlikely to provoke a moral dilemma in anyone, least of all me. I would like to see a time when abortion is considered an intelligent, logical, humble, compassionate thing to do. I would like abortion to be considered as, perversely, one of the ultimate acts of good mothering.

–– Enter the debate at The Times mothering blog: timesonline.co.uk/alphamummy.

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