Just another Monday evening.

I'm taking a test tonight.

I've been away from the blogosphere, trying to write a report for Red Pepper on the progress of abortion rights in Ireland and the new reproductive activist wave in London. I've also been nauseous, off my food and feeling generally off. It's probably nothing. It could be stress. It could be coughing pig death. Or, I could be pregnant.

Despite a rigorous contraceptive routine, despite taking every precaution, despite the fact that I'm still bleeding, I could be pregnant. No method is 100% failsafe. So tonight, I'm taking a test, and before I do, in order to break the silence and calm my nerves, I'm going to talk about it.

Since I started this blog, I've had three pregnancy scares, not counting the frisson of gut-knawing panic that precedes the monthly gut-crunching pain. And every time, I've thought about discussing the process, and every time, I've decided against it. Some things are just a bit TMI, aren't they? Some things you just don't talk about. Pissing on a little stick in an ecstasy of paranoia and worry in your bathroom is one of them. Nice girls aren't supposed to talk about needing to do things like that.

Well, bollocks to it. No more prissy little silences. When gender activists talk about the personal being political, this is what we mean.

If you have never been a female person of childbearing age, you cannot possibly understand what we mean when we say pregnancy scare - but I'd like you to try. Firstly, scare is precisely the right word. For the hours or days or weeks between having a hunch and knowing for certain one way or the other, you're rent by the possibility that your body is not your own. Personally, it's not so much the idea of actually having a growing embryo inside you that's terrifying. We've all had headlice. No, it's the knowledge that if you are pregnant, your very nethers are suddenly in the grip of forces outside your control: arbitrary social taboos, the machinations of a hypocritical state that hates female reproductive independence, the personal morals of not one but two total strangers who are meant to know best what you should be allowed to do with the best dreams of your one life just because they have medical degrees. Compared to that, a tadpole in my tummy is not scary.

Because if by some slim chance this test comes out positive, if it's the red cross this time, that portentous clowneye leering back at me, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to have an abortion.

And in a rational, sensible world, that's all I should actually need to say. My decision over whether or not to incubate a fetus in my own belly for nine months and go through agonising labour should be justification enough. But of course, it's not like that, is it? If this test comes out positive, I will have to explain myself, like a criminal, like a naughty schoolgirl called in to the headmaster's office, if I want a perfectly reasonable medical procedure, a procedure that wasn't even a misdemeanour before 1803. Oh yes, abortion wasn't always illegal. Far from it. It's only recently that the state has seen fit to stamp its morals all over our bodies. But unless I want to be considered a criminal - like this poor girl - I'll have to explain myself. So here it is.

I want to have a child at some point in my life. Unlike quite a lot of my female friends, I *am* a maternal person. I'd love a little baby to take care of and bring up. And I want that child on my own time, when I'm confident in my own ability to bring it up in financial and emotional security. Right now I'm broke, broken, living in a house full of stoners with a fledgling career that may one day prove lucrative but right now has me working 12-hour days for a half-salary. I am determined to ground myself in my own life before I even think about having a baby. How can I raise a kid to be independent before I have the first clue who I am?

Right now, I'm finding it bloody difficult just to take care of myself, although I'm getting better at that. I'd be rubbish at taking care of a child. I'd be far, far worse at taking care of a disabled child. Oh, yes, that's the other thing: my partner has a genetic bone disorder. His main symptoms are physical incapacity and near-constant pain. There's a fifty percent chance that any child we have together will inherit the condition, and a slim chance that it would be born with a much more aggressive strain. Not to mention that the kid would almost certainly also inherit a tendency towards mental health difficulties of various flavours, from both of us. For this reason...well, we're young, but we've already had the baby talk. Our options when and if the time comes include screening or IVF, if we have the cash and tenacity; sperm donation; or adoption. Our options, my options, definitely do NOT include raising a severely disabled child, a child in constant pain, on my salary and his benefits, when we've got the whole world to explore before we make that decision, before I make that decision.

I'm telling you all this because I want you to understand what I mean when I say reproductive freedom. Reproductive freedom is the freedom to make choices like this without having them imposed on you by a misogynist state. Reproductive freedom is the freedom to choose your own destiny. Reproductive freedom is something that, at the moment, women in England, Scotland and Wales have in limited capacity, and women in Ireland and many, many other parts of the world have not at all. Even here in the People's Republic of Haringey I can't, for example, just pop down to my GP's surgery and ask for an abortion because I happen to want one. I'll have to beg and cry and point at my mental health record, declare myself an unfit mother when I know that in a few years' time, fates willing, I'll be no such thing.

The standard line is that every abortion is a hard decision, every abortion is a tragedy. Well, there's nothing hard for me about this decision. There's nothing tragic about this, in my mind. Tragedy would be three lives ruined by bringing an unwanted child into the world. Tragedy would be a child growing up raised by children, a child growing up in poverty and self-doubt. That's one tragedy I won't allow to happen, not to my kid, not to my partner, and not to me. I've too much self-respect, and too much to lose.

Soon now I'll be squatting scared over a ridiculous little stick, about as alone as any girl can be. My heart in my mouth, my own pee on my fingers. This happens regularly, actually, to most women. We just don't talk about it. Part of that is fear, part of it is a deliberate campaign of deception on the part of the right-wing media, a press bias whereby we hear regular stories of women bitterly regretting decisions to terminate pregnancy, and no stories at all of the many, many occasions where women choose to have abortions, and it's the right choice, and it turns out fine. Until we start being honest about it, until we start standing up (remembering to wash our hands first) to claim sovereignty over our own bodies, until we stop making these excuses, making cringing little justifications for what should be our right as human beings, then it's only going to get harder to hang on to the small freedoms we still have. The freedom to talk about reproductive choice openly and honestly can be a start, if we want it to be.

I'm writing this because I don't want to be part of the conspiracy of silence any more. I wish more than anything that there were positive stories for me to read, for me and my friends and sisters to read, stories of strong women making positive decisions about their own lives and the lives of their future and current children. Because if there were more of these honest stories out there, maybe I wouldn't be quite so scared right now. Wish me luck, guys.

ETA: Negative. Phew.