In 1964, three years before I was born, my mother had a back-street abortion. The details are sketchy - it's a story she told me a long time ago and it's not something she's ever referred to again. She was 17. She'd got pregnant on holiday by an older man who took advantage of her youth, her rebellious streak and her naivety. It was a one-night stand and she never met him again.
She didn't dare tell her mother what had happened. I can barely imagine the terror she must have felt when she discovered she was pregnant. Nor how alone and frightened she must have been when, through whispered word of mouth among friends, she finally got the phone number of a back-street abortionist.
Mum was one of the lucky ones back in the early Sixties before a 28-year-old David Steel steered the right to a legal abortion through the House of Commons in 1967. Lucky that she didn't bleed to death in a botched procedure, lucky that the untrained abortionist didn't leave her unable to conceive again.
In a way I was lucky, too. For if she hadn't had that abortion she would never have met my father, fallen in love with him, never settled down with him, never given birth - to me. Did she make the right decision? I believe she still looks back with regret. But that doesn't mean she didn't make the right decision.
I have never been pregnant (my mother's story was a persuasive argument in favour of contraception). I've never gone through the dilemma of deciding what to do if I got pregnant. However, I know many women of my generation who have had a termination and not one of their stories is as heartless or careless as the anti-abortion lobby would like us to believe.
One woman I know desperately wanted a child but her partner already had children from a previous relationship and didn't want another. She, meanwhile, was not in a position to embark on single motherhood. Several used contraception that failed. Another got pregnant in the heady first week of a new fling and didn't believe that the relationship would survive. The couple subsequently stayed together and they've since had a baby boy. In all of these cases the men involved were consulted before a decision was taken.
No one hears the complicated, messy truth behind these stories, these so-called 'social' abortions (a worryingly misleading phrase inferring that these were terminations fitted into a moleskin diary between a shopping trip on Bond Street and a dinner party). The taboo that surrounds abortion is such that few women speak out, my mother included, about the difficult decisions that lead them to an abortion clinic.
Sue Townsend wrote a novel partly based on two abortions she had after her daughter was born and has also spoken out about the subject in interviews. Brit artist Tracey Emin has talked about her terminations. These are lone public voices despite the fact that 80 per cent of Britons believe in the right for women to choose abortion. The pro-choice lobby seems to have faded from view. Complacent, maybe, that they'd won the fight.
Almost 40 years on, the pro-life people seem to have hijacked the debate. They've been given the perfect opportunity - compelling pictures of a baby foetus in the womb at 13 weeks old. These are pictures which exercise a raw emotional power over all of us - especially when plastered across a front page, blown up for effect to several times the real size (at three months old a foetus is six centimetres long). The foetus is given a personality - 'I can walk and smile' - despite the fact that scientists agree it cannot actually feel anything until 18 weeks.
These images easily achieve the goal of the pro-lifers - to isolate the foetus and make us see it as a smiling, walking, bouncing baby. So long as the debate is about cute 'baby' pictures, anti-abortionists can get away with dodging the more complicated issues.
Meanwhile, we've lost sight of the woman's unenviable position. It is a fact of life: as long as men and women have sex there will be unwanted pregnancies. Women need time and resources to make the right decision - yet recommendations from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service that what we actually need is easier access to early abortions go unheeded. Instead, the argument is fast going in the opposite direction.
When, provoked no doubt by the coverage of professor Stuart Campbell's emotive pictures, Tony Blair announced a proposed debate on the ultimate time limit on a termination. The anti-choice lobby would have us believe that it has compelling new evidence about foetuses that requires a change in the law.
In fact, the arguments are the same now as they were in the Eighties when attempts were made to amend the original 1967 abortion act. Anti-abortion campaigners talked then as now of the perfectly-formed human beings who were being murdered in utero. Instead of photographs, anti-abortion campaigners would flourish specimen jars containing aborted foetuses to support arguments for reducing the time limit. Then, as now, politicians who were fundamentally opposed to all abortions sought to reduce the time limit on such grounds as 'brain activity', succeeding, in 1990, in getting the time limit cut from 28 to 24 weeks.
Now the argument is turning towards a 22-week limit. Some campaigners suggest 18 weeks. This would bring us in line with France, we're told. What we're not told is that, even with this time limit, France carries out a higher percentage of abortions than this country.
We live in an age in which parenting has become an obsession. Childless couples mortgage their homes to pay for IVF, travel to eastern Europe in search of donors, trawl the internet for fertility answers. Women who decide against a pregnancy are branded as unfulfilled, unhappy. If you don't want a baby you're an outcast. But the truth is that for as long as women can get pregnant there will always be some who make the difficult decision not to go ahead with it.
My generation of child-bearing women weren't alive when back-street abortions were the norm. We haven't had to make the lonely bus journey my mother made, seeking out the address scribbled furtively on a piece of paper, to go through an operation she has barely ever spoken about.
We have, thankfully, been able to worry less about unwanted pregnancies or about being killed or left infertile by unskilled abortionists. But this has made us complacent about protecting our rights. The cases where women seek late abortions may be few but if you are the woman who needs one, a change in the law could be your personal disaster.
What my mother's generation knew - and we are in danger of forgetting - is that no woman casually decides to have an abortion beyond 20 weeks. Late abortions arise from terrible circumstances and difficult choices. But if pro-choice women don't speak out we are in danger of seeing our rights whittled away. And those of our daughters, too.
· Rachel Evans is a pseudonym
