‘I have been doing my abortion doula work for over five years. On average I have sat with three women a week going through a pregnancy termination. Well over 130 women in varying mental and emotional states. Never, never, have I tried to force anyone to adopt a moral position. Never have I ever told any of those women they should not go through with the procedure. But there are two crucial matters at play here. Amber is seventeen, as you well know. She could not – according to California State Law – have an abortion now without parental approval. More to the point, she is not five months pregnant as you first told me, but six months and ten days.’

‘See, see,’ I said to Klara. ‘I told you –’

‘Stay out of this, Poppa,’ she said.

‘Why should he do that?’ Elise asked. ‘You pulled him into this. You got him to bring me into it. We drove hours to help you and this terrified young woman.’

‘She told me she will not carry the baby of the man who raped her. You force her to do that –’

‘I will not participate in an abortion of a fetus at twenty-five weeks and three days,’ Elise said. ‘Nor, young lady, will any legitimate doctor.’

‘Don’t you fucking “young lady” me. If you can’t deal with this, I’ll get someone who can,’ Klara said.

‘Then you will be dealing not with a legitimate doctor, but a dangerous, backroom quack.’

‘I can find someone. Anyway, California law is vague on this: between twenty-three and twenty-eight weeks. She’s now just into the twenty-fifth week.’

‘But she is still a minor. She needs an adult to sanction the abortion. At her age twenty-three weeks will be judged the frontier beyond which this pregnancy should not be terminated. Personally speaking I too believe that twenty-three weeks is the right limit. After that the fetus is too formed. Terminating the pregnancy now will mean turning to the sort of illegal, grubby abortionists whom women had to turn to before Roe versus Wade. And you will be actually committing a heinous offense.’

‘But she wants to terminate –’

‘Yes, that is what the hysterical, battered, raped and – as she told me – repeatedly sodomized seventeen-year-old said that she wanted. The state will probably rule that, as she is underage –’

‘Fuck the state.’

‘What are you saying? That we don’t abide by the rule of law? In doing so we are giving the other side all the ammunition they need. The law is right on this matter. Just as it is also right to insist that an underaged young woman cannot be allowed to make this sort of decision without parental approval.’

‘Her parents are dead. She was taken in by that rich anti-abortion monster who will do everything to get his baby.’