I am five and a half months pregnant with a little boy. He has ten perfect fingers, ten perfect toes, a round little belly, and the most beautiful nose an ultrasound scan has ever seen. He is feisty – at every scan, starting at nine weeks, he has been kicking his legs around just the same way, dancing happily in my womb. At his twenty-week scan, he lifted one perfectly formed foot up, momentarily obscuring the probe’s view with the delicate sole of his foot, causing the ultrasonographer and I to laugh at him already being stubborn. He likes throwing his hands around too. Nearly every attempt to measure the diameter of his head was foiled by him raising his hands to the side of his head and holding them there, blocking the measurement. He took quite some convincing to let us see his face. The ultrasonographer kept remarking ‘look at that wonderful little person’.

He has a name, and he already is being called a nickname by his grandad. That same grandad is already planning to take him to football, and has planned to buy him a season ticket as a present the Christmas before he turns five.

My husband and I are gradually building a library of books to read to him once he is born: a children’s Bible, stories about animals going on adventures, books to help him learn about the world around him. He has clothes, and his gran is excitedly knitting him more, updating me on her progress as she goes – a little jumper in air-force blue, and a hat to match. His great-gran is making him a baptism gown out of spare fabric from my wedding dress, worrying anxiously about making it perfect. He has a godmother and a godfather selected, and his first stuffed toy has been bought for him as a gift by his godmother: a dinosaur, green with scales down its back, and as soft as can be.

He has his own rhythm of the day. When I sit down to rest, he gives me a few reassuring kicks to let me know he is growing happily. At night, when I lie down, he almost invariably gives a series of rhythmic kicks, three or four at a time, perfectly spaced like the bassline of a song. It makes me wonder if maybe he’ll have a gift for music, an intrinsic sense of the beat and pulse of a piece. It would be surprising as I don’t have a musical bone in my body, and I’m not aware of my husband being a secret musical genius either. But our son is clearly already his own person, so maybe he’ll surprise us. I just hope it’s not the drums that he proves to be wonderful at.

And yet, if I were to ask, I could have my son’s head crushed, and his limbs torn off one by one. And the NHS would pay for it.

That is the reality of the country we live in. The little person who kicks and turns, and has his own personality already, can be brutally killed at a moment’s notice if my feelings about him change.

If I didn’t love this little boy, [too many] people would stop talking excitedly about him, preparing for his birth, and would instead describe his dismemberment as ‘healthcare’ or my ‘right to choose’. The congratulations and inquiries about how the baby and I are doing would turn into commiserations and offers of a lift to a clinic.

How ridiculous, how intellectually dishonest have we become as a country, when the value we see in a person is determined by the subjective feelings of another person in that moment. How morally bankrupt have we become, when the exact same human being is either protected or legally slaughtered based on whether they are ‘wanted’ at that moment or not.

It isn’t the love that we have for our son that makes him valuable. It isn’t his name or clothes or books. It isn’t the stuffed dinosaur waiting to be gifted to him when he is born. It is his humanity. The very fact that he is a human being. And that doesn’t change based on my feelings towards him.

If I didn’t want him, if there was no plan for a sunshine-yellow nursery and a football season ticket, it wouldn’t change anything about him. He would still be the same human being. He would have the same kicking legs, the same perfect heartbeat, the same right to life.

There is no other situation where one human being’s right to be protected from violence is conditional upon another human being’s feelings about them. There is no other situation where a child’s right to age-appropriate care disappears if someone finds them inconvenient. No other situation where we go from excitedly preparing to meet to proudly killing a human being because of the circumstances they exist in.

The law is inherently ridiculous. Either my son is a human being or he is not. Either he is valuable or he is not. Either he should be protected from violence or he should not. Since the moment he was conceived, nothing about who my son intrinsically is has changed. He has been the same human being since the very moment his life began. Sure, he has grown bigger and become more developed, but he will continue to do that long after the NHS would happily murder him for me, and long after he is born.

Why does his protection from violence not stay the same from the moment he was conceived? Why do we try to fool ourselves into thinking that, at a certain point, including the moment that I am writing this, it would be entirely acceptable, even good, to violently end his life, in the name of ‘choice’? Why would we allow me, as his mother, the person who should be willing to do anything to protect him, to have him torn to pieces for my own convenience?

Every human being, from the moment of conception until the moment of natural death has inherent, inalienable, and infinite dignity. Every human being has a right to be protected from violence, even if they are unwanted or inconvenient.

Life is a right, not a privilege.