"Guys, it's my body."

For the last year, I have been writing a play about a young woman’s decision either to keep or abort a pregnancy. About a month ago, I wrote my final scene, pulled everything together, stayed up till the early hours of the morning and read through it, from start to end.

When I reached the end, I realised that I was far from finished.

The thing I had overlooked all year long when I had been writing the play was the very message I wanted to put across at the start. I had spent so long deliberating whether the character should or shouldn’t terminate this unplanned pregnancy that it began to feel like it was me, and not Gemma (my main protagonist), making the decision. Kind of ironic given my standpoint on this issue.

I have never been pregnant, let alone experienced an unplanned pregnancy. You get some pro-lifers who concede that “Yeah, I guess if she’s raped then that’s different, maybe abortion is okay then”, but I consider that argument irrelevant. There are near-infinite reasons why a woman might want to terminate a pregnancy: it was conceived through rape; she can’t afford it; she considers herself too young or too old; she doesn’t think she’s ready; she’s afraid for hers or the baby’s physical or mental wellbeing; she does not want children... The reasoning does not alter the effect. If a woman does not want to donate her body to another being for nine months (and then some; the effects of pregnancy don’t cease entirely after birth), is that not all there is to it?

Very often in life, you try to see things from another’s point of view by saying to yourself, “What would I do if I was in that situation?” I am sure there are plenty of women who would or who have continued with a pregnancy which was conceived through rape, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with those who choose to do that. That is their choice. I have known women who have fallen pregnant accidentally and gone on to have a baby, and there is nothing wrong with that choice. But what is right for those women might not necessarily be right for every other woman on the face of the earth. Do I know what I would do if I fell pregnant tomorrow? I know what I might do, but how do you ever truly know what you would do until you are in that situation? You only have to look at history and at places where abortion is illegal to see the damaging effects this has on women’s health; spend any length of time on the web and you will find countless personal stories of women who have suffered or even died as the result of the unavailability of abortion clinics. In fact, I’ll start you off with this one.

I don’t agree that men shouldn’t have opinions on abortion – after all, I have opinions on all kinds of stuff that don’t directly affect me – but there’s a difference between opinion and dictating. I might think that my friend painting her bathroom pea green is a poor choice, but I’m not going to march into her home with a pot of paint and a roller and paint over it blue. (Weird analogy, but you get my point.) Ultimately, abortion is an issue that will never directly affect men. Men do not have wombs, nor vaginas, nor breasts (well, not the kind that lactate, anyway), and yet more than three-quarters of MPs are male. These are currently the people making decisions about women’s reproductive rights, and that, if anything, is wrong.