You check into hospital to give birth to the baby you have carried for nine long months, the baby you may even have named, who has probably come to know everything about you - from your uncontrollable and unattractive laugh to the way your voice breaks when you're about to cry, and even the way you stop breathing momentarily when you sneeze.

You leave the hospital with your little bundle, and 10 months later are tracked down by Social Services and given the rudest shock of your life - that the little girl you have formed an inextricable bond with, is, in fact, not yours to keep and has absolutely no biological connection with either you or her father.

While the Rebecca Gomperts' pro-abortion debate was underway at Castille Hotel in Valletta, I was lying on my bed watching a story on Sky News about a hospital mix-up that occurred in the Czech Republic. Two families became victims of an unfortunate twist of fate: their babies were born at the same time, in the same hospital, and were accidentally switched while being weighed by staff. The couples eventually tracked each other down, but the part of the story which impressed me most was their mutual decision not to swap the babies back immediately, but to continue living out the charade for a further period of readjustment.

I thought about the story long and hard, finding it rather uncanny that while Gomperts was saying that a child is not a human being until he or she is actually born, I was pondering the antithetical theory that the babies in our womb are likely to know far more about us than we could ever hope to know about them. Indeed, had the babies in this case been able to talk, this hospital blunder may well have been avoided. But unfortunately, babies don't have a say over whether or not they are born, to whom, and what happens to them after that.

In the weeks following Gomperts' visit, when we were subjected to the inevitable mud slinging in the local papers between the sacrosanct gift of life versus the sacrosanct right to freedom of expression, I was wondering what had become of the two Czech families.

I have found that age has not really sharpened my sense of moral absolutes. There are many ifs, buts and maybes. And I find I do grey much better than I do black or white. Yet abortion is one of those convictions I never quite outgrew.

A couple of Sunday lunches ago, abortion came up and we got to the 'what-if-you-were-raped' part, when I decided to tell my little hospital story in a bid to show that it is not just biology which determines whether we love our children. Just as we can love others' children as much as our own, we are capable of loving a child who may have been conceived in a rape situation. True, we may want no memory of the person who made it happen, but that in itself does not make loving that child impossible.

Naturally, I was told I had missed the point: that no woman should be made to carry and give birth to a child conceived in nightmarish circumstances when her consent was wholly absent. And perhaps I had. But I suspect having an abortion may be even more wounding than the rape. After all, it is an irreversible decision, one you have to live with for the rest of your life, one you need to make in a hurry, at a time when you are at your most hormonal, afraid and confused. Abortion may temporarily give you back your life , but if it does so at the expense of your soul, then you may find you don't want it back.

People have abortions for various reasons and I am not about to point fingers or preach. I am not immune to the grey area in the abortion debate. I know there are many children out there who were born to people who did not want or deserve them; babies who are persistently neglected. Yet I am still fundamentally against abortion, perhaps because I am alive, and that in itself is reason enough as far as I am concerned.

Admittedly, people don't all get dealt the same hand, but there are many who, despite their raw deal, given the choice, would still choose to come back. The way I see it, life is one big lottery and birth is your ticket. There are no guarantees that you are going to get lucky, but without that ticket you rule out your chances - absolutely. Everyone has the right to participate, and everyone has the right to live.