The first thing a smiling Anne Quesney does when she arrives at the north London cafe where we meet is announce that she does not want the interview to be about whether she has had an abortion. "It would only distract from the issues."
Quesney, who has been at the helm of Abortion Rights - the only national pro-choice campaign group in the UK - since it was formed in 2004, is reluctant to speak about her personal life. And she never explains why a personal experience of abortion would be a distraction. Instead, she chooses to concentrate on why it is such a frustrating time to be a pro-choice campaigner.
Abortion Rights is gearing up for the 40th anniversary next year of the 1967 Abortion Act, the landmark legislation that legalised abortion for the first time in the UK. But while it would ordinarily be a time for all pro-choice supporters to celebrate the endurance of a hard-fought-for civil right, Quesney says she and her organisation have found themselves on the back foot, having to defend the basic tenets of the law. This, she says, is because of a renewed and "sustained attack" from anti-choice (or, as they prefer to be called, "pro-life") activists.
Their latest assault is, in Quesney's view, a multi-pronged and dangerous campaign because it uses a combination of scare tactics, intimidation and brazen attempts to overturn the 1967 act. It also, she says, misleads the public by fostering hysterical news reporting.
While the UK has not yet reached the point where abortion clinics and physicians are attacked, as has happened in the US, she is obviously concerned that UK-based groups at the extreme end of the anti-abortion movement are increasingly mimicking the more aggressive tactics of their American counterparts. "We have seen a complete parallel with tactics used in the US," Quesney says.
One recent example of intimidation was a storm of hate mail sent to staff at a Catholic girls' school in Surrey where sex education was being taught to 14- and 15-year-olds, as required by the national curriculum. In another case, a nurse at King's College London had her personal details posted on the internet.
Such incendiary action is, Quesney says, "changing the terms of the debate" around abortion in Britain. So too, she claims, is another, simultaneous line of attack: the call for a reduction in the legally permissible cut-off point for late abortions from 24 weeks to 22. As a result, many people who claim to be pro-choice are now wavering over whether abortions should be carried out after 20 weeks.
It has proved to be a lightning-rod issue. A pivotal moment came earlier this year with the submission of a private member's bill in parliament to ban all abortion except where the mother's life is at risk or where the pregnancy is due to rape. The attempt failed.
Medical advances
However, Quesney believes it has helped stoke up public outrage unnecessarily, as did misleading articles in some tabloids suggesting that medical advances had improved foetal survival. It also, she argues, gave church leaders such as Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the Catholic church in England and Wales, an opportunity to try to "undermine women's reproductive rights".
"The arguments put forward by the anti-choice lobby are completely dogmatic," she says. "They do not take into account people's real life circumstances because they are often based on archaic religious beliefs."
But dogma, Quesney says, is only one part of the problem. "I have found over the years that they [some of the anti-choice lobby] pump out an awful lot of lies - abortion causes breast cancer, psychological trauma, depression, infertility, etc. They do this to scare and intimidate women in the hope of chipping away at women's hard-fought-for rights and, ultimately, to make abortion illegal."
Quesney accepts that her organisation's campaigns have been drowned out by noise from the opposition. "We don't have any emotive pictures to exploit," she says, referring to the recent publication in newspapers of high-resolution ultra-sound pictures of foetuses. (The images were quickly latched on to by some anti-abortion activists as evidence of foetuses walking and waving in the womb). "Foetuses do not survive outside the womb any earlier than they did 2,000 years ago," she says.
Backed by the British Medical Association and other professional medical bodies, the government last month firmly rejected calls for a reduction of the statutory time limit on abortion. The public health minister, Caroline Flint, emphasised - as Quesney does during the interview - that only a very small number of abortions take place after 22 weeks, and then only under restricted circumstances. In the UK, only 1.6% of around 180,000 abortions annually are performed after 20 weeks.
The government's defence of the law is a victory of sorts for the pro-choice movement. But is Quesney angry at having to react all the time?
"Yes, I am angry sometimes," she says in her soft-spoken tone with its gentle lilt that alludes to her native Belgium. Her easy demeanour is sometimes hard to reconcile with her tough, straight-talking.
Finally, after a bit of gentle prodding, Quesney opens up about her motivation for getting immersed in abortion rights in Britain. (At this point in the interview a woman and a crying infant sit at the next table. The baby makes a lot of noise, but Quesney, her smile still in place, carries on undaunted).
"When I was a teenager in Belgium, abortion was still illegal," she says. "This was the late 1980s! It was a real issue of conscience." She has been interested in reproductive rights ever since, she explains, because she sees it as "an issue of autonomy, of equality".
Quesney settled in England, teaching French and German, but could not resist the pull to campaign. "It was an instinctive feeling that you can improve people's lives," she says.
But isn't it a laborious, uphill struggle when what you are campaigning for is so morally and ethically sensitive and views are extremely polarised? "Of course, on the one hand it is frustrating," she admits. "But, on the other hand, there is a sense that if we weren't there, who would be doing this very important job of keeping rights a priority?"
Britain's abortion law is one of the most restrictive in Europe. Quesney wants it to be liberalised, as it is in most other European countries, so that women can get an abortion on request, without the need for a doctor's approval.
"At the moment, it is a real postcode lottery," she argues. "Depending on the area you come from, it can be very difficult to access an abortion, especially late abortions." The NHS is not legally compelled to perform abortions, and provision varies across the country.
Strangely resigned
For a campaigner with such a tough job, Quesney is at times strangely resigned to not making much progress. She does not foresee the 1967 act changing in favour of the pro-choice lobby any time soon.
Meanwhile, the most reassurance she can offer on Northern Ireland - where the 1967 Abortion Act does not apply so an abortion can only be attained in rare circumstances on strict medical grounds - is that Abortion Rights "works closely" with women's groups and others but it "is not the main thrust of our campaign".
The baby at the next table has given up screaming in favour of gurgling contentedly. Quesney, still smiling, rounds off our interview on an optimistic note that belies the challenges she believes she faces.
"Campaigning on reproductive rights [means] you can empower people," she says enthusiastically. "There are lots of positive things happening at UN and European level, where there's a real push to enshrine women's rights within certain conventions."
And as for herself? "I know that when I wake up in the morning, when I go to work, I am hoping I can really make a difference in people's lives."
· Abortion facts and figures at SocietyGuardian.co.uk/health
Curriculum vitae
Age 40.
Lives London.
Status Lives with partner.
Education Athénée Royal, Comines, Belgium; Ecoles des Beaux-Arts, Paris, diploma in drama and history of art; Université de Lille III and University College Cork, English literature and language, applied linguistics and German.
Career 2004-present: director, Abortion Rights; 2001-04: international campaign coordinator, Landmine Action; 1999-2001: campaigns coordinator, National Abortion Campaign; 1999-2001: education development officer, Education for Choice; 1998-99: volunteer campaigner for the Free Tibet Campaign, Amnesty International and Christian Aid, 1991-99: taught French and German, in the UK & abroad, both in mainstream comprehensive and special needs education.
Interests Travel, politics, art, drama, cinema, languages, socialising, walking and yoga.
