Babies, babies, blah blah blah. Don't worry, I'm not going to bore you with tales of my small son's astonishing ability to shove Rice Krispies up his nose, nor of my own mothering insights (don't do lunch involving more than one toddler; er, that's it). But this story - which is a story about the beginning and ending of life - does begin with my pregnancy.
I discovered I was pregnant in February 2005, after several weeks of heavy drinking and flying to and from the States for work. I was 38, in a settled relationship and, despite my non-ideal lifestyle, our baby was planned. So far, so straightforward. What was unplanned, for me, were the questions that resulted. Was I having a boy or a girl? Would we like the same music? Would we like each other? But I also found myself pondering other, trickier, dilemmas. I spent some time thinking about the precise point when our baby came into existence. Was he there before I did the test? Something was, or the test couldn't have come up positive. But what? A person? A potential person? Life? What was life exactly?
Life and death, and when they lurch from one into the other, had been preoccupying me ever since my grandmother had died five months previously. In her final month of life - she was 101 - Granny was isolated in her own room, pumped full of morphine and saline. Gradually, her body wasted away to skin and bone and her mind withered too. Eventually, her personality retreated so far within, it was hard to tell if she was conscious, even when her eyes were open.
At one point, when my mum and I were sitting with her, Granny suddenly began moaning, clawing at the tubes going in and out of her body. I looked into her face. She gazed back, distraught, still grabbing and waving, imploring. I suddenly became convinced that she wanted me to pull out the drips. She needed me to help her to die. And I thought about doing it, but I just couldn't. No matter how much I loved my Granny - and I did - and no matter how horrible the situation she was in - and it was - I couldn't end her life. I told her so. I watched her flail in frustration for a while. Then she stopped. She died two days later.
Skip forward two years - during which I got pregnant and gave birth to a son, Patrick - and I am making a television documentary about abortion rights in the United States for More4. But what I'm really doing is trying to answer the questions that my Granny's death threw up for me. Is it ever morally right to kill? What if you love the person you're killing? Does it make any difference if you don't want them to die? What if they're a long way from being a full person - independent, full-facultied, vital - should that affect your decision?
The abortion debate in the US isn't always framed in those terms, but it asks all those questions. The anti-abortion groups say it is wrong to take innocent life - though they often support the death penalty. They say it's irrelevant whether the pregnant woman loves or doesn't love her baby, whether she wants it or not: it's alive, so she shouldn't kill it. And they believe that it should make no difference that the life inside her has only just embarked on its journey to fully becoming a person. It's made from a human sperm and egg, it's living, so it is morally wrong to kill it. The pro-choicers say it's up to the woman to decide whether she wants a pregnancy to continue to its full term or not.
Like most women - at least most British women - I have always been firmly in the pro-choice camp because I've spent nearly all of my sexually active life trying not to get pregnant. Throughout my twenties and the better part of my thirties, I did everything that was required for me not to have a child (other than, you know, not having sex). I wasn't always safe - I've necked morning-after pills like vitamin tablets - but I was lucky enough not to end up in a situation where I was pregnant and didn't want to be. I've never had an abortion, though I am mighty glad that legal abortion exists.
When I got pregnant so soon after my Granny's death, it felt weird. My mind kept returning to the pregnancy test. If my reaction to those fateful double lines that said 'baby ahead' had been horror instead of hurrah - and, to be honest, it wasn't unalloyed joy that I felt when I saw them; I was scared, too - then I would have had little hesitation in having an abortion. But it was that very fact that was confusing me. I was calling the life inside me a baby because I wanted it. 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.
But I couldn't be an anti-abortionist! I'm not religious. I have ethics, but they're nice squishy ones: I'm humanist, liberal, anti-establishment. And I'm a feminist. I have more than one Andrea Dworkin book and I'm not ashamed of that. I certainly don't want to shackle women to their wombs. A civilised society should allow us to have children if and when we desire them.
When I went for the 12-week scan, I was given a picture of our baby, in profile. He seemed to be waving, but that's just the way the limbs move, isn't it? At about 18 weeks into my pregnancy, I felt a kick. It's a strange sensation, like an internal giggle. Traditionally, this is called the 'quickening' and is the point at which the life inside you is named as a baby. But I could still have aborted this quick, kicking thing: legally, in the UK, you can terminate up until 24 weeks, though such late abortions are extremely rare, and they are almost always carried out for medical reasons.
It was a 1990 amendment to the UK's 1967 Abortion Act that reduced the abortion limit from 28 weeks to 24. This was partly due to the viability argument, which holds that if a baby/foetus/whatever you want to call it can survive outside the womb at 23 weeks, then abortion shouldn't really be allowed past that point. Recently, in the US, Amillia Taylor survived after being born at just under 22 weeks into her mother's pregnancy. Science is moving viability closer and closer to conception. So it seems to me to be a loose argument. Why should abortion only be moral when science says it is? Either abortion is right, or it isn't.
My questions weren't being answered in the UK, where abortion isn't really talked about. So I decided to go to America, where abortion is a hot, divisive and political topic. Incremental legislation initiated by US anti-abortionists has brought in more and more restrictions on a woman's right to a legal termination that was established by the landmark Supreme Court case of Roe v Wade in 1973. Since then, Republican Presidents such as Ronald Reagan and the Bushes have installed anti-abortion judges at the Supreme Court: the last time Roe v Wade was challenged, in 1992, it was only upheld by a five-to-four majority.
The pro-choice camp feels under threat. And in the Deep South it is. Most people there are anti-abortion. Their politicians are the same and, thus, there are very few abortion facilities. In Mississippi, a vast state of more than 48,000 square miles with almost three million inhabitants, there is just one abortion clinic. One! Despite my dilemmas, I could feel my feminist hackles rise. The clinic has anti-abortion protesters campaigning outside it every day. They shout, they plead, they put up placards, they hand out leaflets.
They include Roy McMillan. I hung out with Roy outside the clinic as he confronted young, mostly black, women coming in for a termination and tried to persuade them to turn back. It wasn't a comfortable morning. 'Shame on you, coming in here with a cross around your neck!' Roy shouted at one poor girl. 'Are you going to nail your baby to the cross?'
Despite his appalling hectoring, I quite liked Roy. He was an unwanted baby, a foundling dumped in a cardboard box and left in a doorway. We to-and-froed for a while. I couldn't understand some of his logic. Say I was pregnant. If Roy believes that abortion is murder, and I - having listened to his arguments - nevertheless decide to have an abortion, then surely I should be arrested and tried as a murderer? Or at least tried for paying someone else to commit the murder for me. But Roy pulled back from this, saying it's the abortion doctors who should be prosecuted. 'They are,' he declared, 'the pushers of abortion. Women are the victims.' Like we're abortion addicts.
As I travelled through the Deep South, I read arguments for and against abortion. Moral philosophy, political discourse, rants. If I'm honest, it seemed that everyone - philosopher, politician, crank - just takes a stance and then justifies it. The most recent pro-choice argument likens being pregnant to waking up one day with a gifted violinist attached to your vital organs. If you remove him, he dies. But obviously no one should be made to wander about with a stranger suckered to them, so - ta-da! - it's OK to throw him off and kill him, just as it's OK to remove a foetus from your womb.
To which I say: phooey. Pregnancy is pretty common. Waking up to find Yehudi Menuhin is your Siamese twin is not. They're not the same thing. Other philosophers argue that abortion is OK, and that infanticide is fine too, because foetuses and little children aren't fully human: they can't look after themselves and they have no concept of death. This made me think of Patrick, back home with his dad. I wondered how close his dad was to killing him (joke), and I missed them both.
In Louisiana, I found that one anti-abortion argument - that life begins at conception - had been taken to extremes. Unborn embryos in Louisiana have the same legal status as children. So they can never be destroyed, as it would be legally the same as killing a child. I met a New Orleans couple whose second baby came from an embryo that had been rescued during Hurricane Katrina: during the storm, the fertility clinic flooded and the electricity was cut off, meaning that thousands of frozen embryos had to be rescued, by armed National Guard, because they could not be allowed to die. Meanwhile, of course, actual living people were being left to perish in the Superdome, or being shot for looting shops for food. Who says Americans don't get irony?
And I came across the Snowflake scheme - a favourite of George W Bush - through which, if you're infertile, you can adopt someone else's frozen embryos and have them inserted in your womb. The resulting children are created by the egg and sperm of strangers, but it's you that gives birth to them. I met a Snowflake family whose three children were created from other people's embryos. They are genetically unrelated to their mum and dad, but 'people say, "Oh the boys look just like you!",' said the mum. 'We just smile and say thanks.'
Lord, this was confusing. If an embryo can survive being artificially created, being frozen, being FedExed hundreds of miles and then implanted into someone else's womb, then surely the anti-abortionists were right? Life does begin at conception. So, I agreed with two conflicting arguments. Life begins when a sperm hits an egg, but women should have the right to abortions. I appeared to believe that women should be allowed to kill.
Perhaps only the young and the old are confident enough to see things in black and white. Hit your late thirties and everything's greyer. Either that, or you just get lazy: you believe whatever suits you at the time.
One of the oddest people I met on my travels was Norma McCorvey. She was Jane Roe in Roe v Wade, which established the right to abortion in the US. Norma won her right to a legal termination, though it was too late for her: she had the baby and it was adopted. Once a poster girl for the pro-choice movement, Norma is now - and I couldn't quite believe this - anti-abortion. A lonely woman, she turned to the church a few years ago, converted to Catholicism and rejected abortion.
Unlike Norma, I don't want to be the kind of person who changes her beliefs according to her circumstances: like people changing from Labour to Conservative as they become richer. And I don't want to tell other people - other women - what to do. But when you see women's abortion rights whittled away as they have been in the US, you can't help but get angry. And when you've experienced the out-and-out weirdness of pregnancy and birth and the fantastic beauty of the resulting child, it's hard not to question what a termination does, or is.
My trip did end with me coming to terms with my two opposing beliefs. Maybe it's as spurious as all the other arguments I heard, but it was when a moral philosopher pointed out that being alive is one thing, but being a human is something else that something clicked.
In the end, I have to agree that life begins at conception. So yes, abortion is ending that life. But perhaps the fact of life isn't what is important. It's whether that life has grown enough to take on human characteristics, to start becoming a person.
In its early stages, the foetus clearly hasn't, so I have no problems with early abortions. In fact, I think they should be given on demand, as they are in France, rather than the UK system which forces women to get two different doctors' signatures in order to get an abortion.
But once an embryo has developed enough to feel pain, or begin a personality, then it has moved from cell life into the first stages of being a human. Then, for me, ending that life is wrong.
That's why I couldn't kill my Granny: although her life was ebbing, she was still there enough to ask me to kill her. I could recognise her. Killing a person, a recognisable human being, is murder. That's why late abortion will always be tricky. Who are we to say whether the life inside is a person, or not?
· 'A Matter of Life and Death' will be on More4, Wednesday at 10.30pm