Had I not been asked to review it for a radio programme, I would not have watched My Foetus on Channel 4 last week. It was advertised as breaking one of the last great taboos, that against showing an abortion on television.
It is not a taboo I am interested in seeing broken. I have always hated images of aborted foetuses. They make me wish I had the power to gather the broken remains and give them a gentle burial, far from curious or horrified eyes.
In fact, the abortion depicted was so early that all we saw afterwards were lacy fragments, sluiced clean of blood, floating helplessly in a glass dish illuminated from below. Images of water were everywhere in the programme.
It began with a heavily pregnant Julia Black, writer and director of My Foetus, floating in a pool, her head back and her long hair flowing around her. It ended with Julia's baby daughter, her face watchful and solemn, reaching up from the pool to touch the lens of the camera which had followed her existence from the age of 24 weeks in her mother's womb.
In between we saw streams, and light scintillating off water, and of course, fragile, tiny, human remains floating in a glass dish.
The haunting images were strangely at odds with the soundtrack. It was as if there were two quite separate sets of thoughts and feelings being given expression in the programme, one through visuals, and the other through words. It was as if there was a battle going on between Julia Black's heart and her head. The head won out, as she remained pro-choice, but the heart cried out wordlessly through the images.
I doubt if anyone could view the programme without revisiting, willingly or not, images from it.
There were terrible pictures, displayed on sides of trucks by an American campaigner, of dismembered foetuses. There were images of extraordinary beauty, as Julia's body swelled to accommodate the foetus she chose to bring to term.
Her voice-over was curiously flat as she explained how her pregnancy had made her want to re-evaluate where she stood on abortion, because this was not her first foetus. She had aborted her first foetus at eight weeks. In her own words, the abortion was a lifestyle choice. The consent of two doctors was a mere formality. She had no regrets, yet at the time she savagely resented a nurse who told her that she had "a healthy eight-week foetus". She has never forgotten those words.
We were also left with words that are hard to banish from the mind. Dr John Parsons was a doctor described as "giving life to women who want it, through IVF, and taking life from women who do not want it, through abortion".
He explained earnestly that if he were requested to perform a late abortion, he did so for the sake of the baby, because there was nothing worse than being an unwanted child. He then went on to explain that there are two ways to perform a late abortion.
The first is to bring on labour, which means that you end up with "a foetus that looks like a small baby dead in the bed". Or there is the alternative. You can dismember the baby and pull it out in pieces through the cervix.
He chooses the latter, because he believes it is better for the mother and the theatre staff. It does mean, however, that he ends up with pieces of dismembered foetus falling into a bucket between his legs, "which is not nice, at all".
Julia Black was obviously disturbed, and found it hard to think of foetuses of that age as anything but babies. She reassured herself that less than 1 per cent of abortions in Britain take place after 21 weeks. Given that there are 184,000 abortions in Britain every year, that means 1,840 babies' lives are ended in this way. She did not use that figure, however, preferring to cling to 1 per cent.
She went to visit another pro-choice doctor, Dr Stewart Campbell, who is pioneering the use of three-dimensional ultrasound. It is like being allowed to visit where we all began. We watched Julia's baby sleep in her womb at 34 weeks.
Then we saw a little creature of nine weeks, snuggled into the walls of her mother's uterus, and a 12-week-old foetus pushing off energetically with his feet, bouncing all around the womb. Suddenly, children's love of bouncy castles makes perfect sense, as it must be the closest any child can come to those moments of complete freedom and weightlessness in the womb.
Dr Campbell wants social abortions restricted to foetuses aged 12 weeks or under, which meant that our little athlete would be deemed expendable. How he differed from a 13-week-old foetus was not made clear.
When it was all over, I could not speak for long minutes. I thought how weak is the power of absence. No one will ever know who that child would have been, how he or she would run or dance or sing or sulk or cry. I thought about the mother, reduced to the undignified spectacle of legs hoist aloft in obstetrical stirrups.
She, too, was rendered anonymous, albeit by her own wish. I wished, more passionately than I can express, that human beings could evolve beyond seeing the ending of human life as a solution to anything, no matter how clinically or cleanly the act is performed.
Ultimately, abortion is not right or wrong because it is bloody or gory. An appendectomy is full of blood and gore, too. It is not right or wrong, depending on whether the embryo is big enough to spark our guilt by resembling too closely a tiny baby. What is the nature of what we vacuum through the cervix and flush down a sink? Is it one of us? You and I were once that size, and just as helpless.
The nature of what we destroy is what makes it right or wrong. The last taboo lies not in televising abortion.
It lies in facing up to our rationalisations about it, in particular our rationalisation that it is somehow a liberation for women. We are no nearer to breaching that last taboo.