Yes, I Am Pro-abortion

The wisdom of debating a TV programme that has yet to be aired is arguable, but the case of Julia Black's forthcoming programme about abortion is more clear-cut than most. The film, due to be aired later this month, includes images of aborted foetuses at 10, 11 and 21 weeks.

Typically, the people who insist on representing the reality of abortion with pictures of 21-week-old foetuses are anti-abortionists - at this stage, of course, the embryo is very identifiably human. It has an outside chance of sustaining life if it were nurtured rather than discarded. A termination at 21 weeks looks as much like murder as it ever will, and the fact that this "reality" occurs only in a few very exceptional cases tends to be ignored in favour of maximum-impact images.

Black, on the other hand, is no anti-abortionist. She was brought up in favour of a woman's right to choose (her father set up Marie Stopes International), and has upheld that belief, though since having a child has registered more ambiguous feelings. Her project, therefore, could conceivably leave her on perilous territory with no allies whatsoever. Those in favour of abortion will object to her using this visual vocabulary, which seems to locate her, ideologically, somewhere between the Pope and the lunatic Americans who nail-bomb clinics. And those against abortion will object to the fact that, actually, she is not with them at all.

In between those two poles will be people who question the motive behind all this. Black claims she wants to make society "re-examine its views on abortion". This is the kind of milky, faux-impartiality that documentary makers shouldn't be able to get away with. Re-examine our views in which direction? On what basis? That if we knew how icky it would be, we wouldn't do it? Without a solid ethical position, this looks like attention-seeking, which is a childish impulse to bring to the debate.

But this film could trigger one valuable shift - it could, indeed it must, force pro-choicers to defend their position. Anti-abortionists set out and argue their position all the time; they have euphemisms ("pro-life" for instance), but aren't afraid of the words - abortion, foetus, baby, termination - and they aren't afraid to interpret them. But pro-choicers simply will not call themselves pro-abortionists. I suppose we could pretend this was to avoid confusion - it might sound as if we believed that, ideally, all pregnancies would end in termination - but that is disingenuous. We don't use the word because it's not very nice. This dovetails with the ongoing taboo around termination. One in three women will have a termination. Why will you never hear a woman say she's had one? Why this persistent guilty silence? Why the standard-issue terminology, where if you do discuss abortion on a personal level at all, it has to be in terms of guilt, and sorrow, and confusion, and anger?

It's because those of us who are in favour of abortions have never thrashed out a rational justification. We let our mothers campaign for its legality, breathed a huge sigh of relief that we could now abort on main roads, rather than back streets, and never stopped to say, "I believe this is my right, and here's why." So, everyone's in this ethical twilight, where we know it's OK, because everyone else has had one; and yet at the same time, we're not completely convinced it's not murder, so we definitely won't be bringing it up at dinner parties.

But that kind of ambiguity is completely inappropriate. Every woman considering an abortion - every woman who's even sexually active - has to decide what, for her, constitutes murder. If you abort at a point when the foetus, if supported, could survive without you, is that murder? Does an embryo only become a human being at nine months? Given that a 12-week-old embryo bears the hallmarks of humanity, does that make it human? We've got into a situation where, because the questions are difficult, we don't ask them. But that makes us easy to attack, because our silence carries such an obvious implication of shame, and what do we have to be ashamed of, if we don't half-believe that this "collection of cells" is actually a very, very small life?

On this matter, we don't need more sympathy or understanding - we need to be tougher-minded and more rigorous, both on ourselves, and with each other. Women with any reservations at all about whether abortion is a right or a crime, well, just don't do it - what in your lifestyle is so valuable that it is worth turning yourself into a killer? And the rest of us, without those reservations, with full confidence in the legitimacy of terminating inchoate foetuses, should for God's sake attest to that publicly and stop colluding in this taboo. We give our opponents more power with our shuffling evasiveness than gory footage of abortions ever will.