However it's discussed, abortion is the deadly price of choice

So why would Black make a film that prompts the word murder? Black told the online pro-choice forum: "Although I had all my reasons as to why abortion was a woman's right to choose I hadn't necessarily ever tested it by looking at abortion from the perspective of destroying the foetus and then defending my position."

Black wants the pro-choice movement to "reclaim the most powerful weapon the anti-abortion groups currently have - the foetus and the baby". She told ABC radio's Fran Kelly: "That's their goal, to make you see the foetus as a baby. I sort of found myself so much swept up in the whole emotion around that abortion equated, you know, [to] the killing of a baby."

But she can't allow herself to get too carried away. Black pulls herself back from the brink, concluding it is possible to be "opposed to what abortion actually is and still be pro-choice". Black's natural horror at the act cannot be allowed to dismantle the abortion edifice. She wants to have her foetus and abort it too.

Still, it's remarkable that in an industry where the right to choose means the right not to know, that she has gone as far as she has. Others have also admitted the baby can't be ignored any more. Naomi Wolf was probably the first. US abortion activist Judith Arcana observes:

We ... have dealt heavily ... in euphemism ... We have been unwilling to talk to women about what it means to abort a baby. We don't ever talk about babies ... The word "choice'' is the biggest euphemism. Some use the phrases "products of conception" and "contents of the uterus", or exchange the word pregnancy for the word foetus. I think it's wrong.

It was wrong that so many women in my book Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief After Abortion were not told the truth. "My baby had fingernails," said Ginger, when she found out, too late.

Black strips away the euphemism in a way no other pro-choicer has. It remains to be seen whether it will be accepted that women have a right to know what abortion does to their babies and how a lifetime of tears may be the price they pay.

Black's daughter Esme was born last September - her dimpled fingers reach out to us in the closing shots.