"Imagine if Mary had to abort Jesus," is what the nihilist in me wants to say to the Christian pro-lifers I walk past each morning standing outside the Marie Stopes Centre, Britain's first family planning clinic, established in 1925.
I want to engage them in discussion removed from dogma, but they avoid eye contact so I shake my head and walk on.
I want to ask them about the ten-year-old girl in Asuncion who is 24 weeks pregnant after being raped by her mother's partner and has been denied an abortion by the Paraguayan Ministry of Health, despite appeals from Amnesty International and the girl's family.
Is that God's plan?
I want their opinion on the two million girls under 14 who give birth to children each year and the 70,000 who die giving birth.
I want to tell them you can be pro-life and pro-choice. When my mother was a trainee midwife delivering babies she also worked as a counsellor at the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS)– helping young women and girls make tough decisions about unplanned pregnancies.
Stopes herself wasn't in favour of abortions but realised their necessity. Her intention was that adequate contraception and education would prevent the need for abortions.
I want to tell the Christian watchdogs what Christopher Hitchens said in his 2010 debate on religion with Tony Blair. "We're the first generation of people who [know] what the cure for poverty really is. It's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you...take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some religious doctrine condemns them...the floor of everything in that village, not just poverty, but health and education, will increase."
They stand on the pavement in the mid-May drizzle holding their rosary beads and solemnly muttering passages from the Bible. They aren't aggressive. There's no shouting or confrontation. Their only banner is a poster of the Virgin Mary. And yet their presence is unsettling because it's unnecessary. And disturbing because they are paid to be there by a local church.
What are they achieving? Are they God's media channel–passing on his marketing messages? Will their presence–the application of guilt–persuade women to have the babies they don't want?
And what about Mary? What if Joseph hadn't been a good man prepared to father a child that wasn't his? What if Mary–unmarried and homeless–had decided it was all too much? Back then she'd have had little choice.
Before contraception, before choice, humans just went ahead with it. Imagine how full this over-crowded planet (seven billion and counting) would be today without the availability of choice.
And let's be quite clear: it's the most difficult choice–to end a life before it's fully formed. No woman ever wants to have an abortion, and few men do either. I speak from experience, both personal and from many women and men I know–sensible, intelligent, loving people who were too young, too wronged, too unprepared, too abused to go through with a pregnancy and the raising of a life.
It's a numbing, unreal feeling; the dawning realisation that what you least wanted to happen has happened. It's one of those things that happens to other people.
In Paraguay, the mother of that ten-year-old girl went to the police when her daughter complained of stomach pains and was arrested and charged with facilitating the rape and neglecting her child.
Laws against abortion must be universally challenged and overturned. Every country must provide legal access to safe terminations, support and guidance. T&T still upholds a 1925 law denying abortion even in the case of rape and incest.
In 2004, Lisa Allen-Agostini wrote in this paper about the estimated 19,000 abortions per year in T&T, of which many are unsafe and 4,000 result in hospitalisation.
"Ballpoint pens. Twigs. Bicycle spokes. Dettol-filled syringes. Knitting needles...intentional fall from roof," she wrote, detailing the gruesome non-medical ways women use.
At the Stopes clinic women from Ireland and Spain come to access services they can't get back home.
And it's not just women who are catered for, men can get vasectomies too–an increasingly common operation but one which people who've had it talk about almost as rarely as abortions. Both operations are social signifiers of shame or failure. One day we will talk about these things more openly.
That day may come sooner when men start taking the birth control pill and sharing the responsibility so that when mistakes are made the narrative won't just be of women having abortions but men too. The male pill will be available by 2017, but will men actually take it? It feels unlikely.
Searching for divine inspiration, on the Internet, I found a blog by someone called Craig Bluemel entitled How God Conceived Jesus In Mary's Womb and it read, "Mary became pregnant when God created a sperm cell in her mature egg after the egg was released by one of her ovaries, and travelled down her Fallopian tube toward the uterus. When Mary missed her period, she realised her pregnancy had already begun."
I've always wanted to know the science behind the miracle, thanks Craig!
Just think, if the pill had been available from the apothecaries of Judea in the year 1 BC, history might have been so very different for Mary and for millions of women today.