Greenham sighed. ‘You’re not a teenager. You’re a young woman soon to be married. There’s no physical reason why you shouldn’t have this baby, and I find it very dubious that a bright young woman such as yourself would find this sufficiently distressing to warrant a termination.’

She wondered what he knew about sufficiently distressing. The photo on his desk showed a couple in their twenties holding a small baby. Perhaps his son or daughter and grandchild. The woman was smiling in delight at the tiny face peering up at her. The loving husband had a beatific gaze: the lion with his pride.

A picture of the perfect family, right there.

But she knew it was never as simple as that. The picture didn’t show the sacrifices the woman had made: the physical difficulties of having a baby – difficulties that her sister, Susie, had delighted in telling her in intimate detail – or the personal and professional desires that got shoved under the bed. It didn’t show the endless days of nappies and bottles and puke until her loving husband came home and she could finally get some sleep – if she wasn’t cooking him dinner or doing the washing.

‘It doesn’t have to be like that,’ Maggie had said. Jim was a modern man. He could cook, change nappies, do a bottle. It was ’76, not ’56.

But, she realised, she didn’t want to do any of that either. She simply didn’t. And it occurred to her then that perhaps she actually didn’t want children at all – not just now, but ever. Despite her career ambitions, despite her seemingly insatiable desire to see what the world could offer, she’d never entertained the possibility she could choose not to have children. She’d always assumed she would one day because that’s what you did, because that’s what society expected, because that’s what Jim wanted, her parents wanted, because it was what so many of her friends were doing. But perhaps she simply didn’t want them at all.

It surprised her to realise this, and with the realisation came relief.

‘If you won’t say yes then I’ll find another doctor who will,’ she said.

He sighed and signed the form.