Controversial footage of a woman undergoing an abortion is to be screened in a Channel 4 documentary tonight. Woman's Editor Christen Pears reports.

A YOUNG woman undergoes an abortion at a clinic. The four-week-old foetus is sucked out using a vacuum pump and placed on a petri dish to be examined. Nothing unusual in that - except that the whole procedure has been filmed as part of a TV documentary.

The abortion, which is carried out on an anonymous woman, is the centrepiece of My Foetus, a programme that is already causing controversy ahead of its broadcast on Channel 4 tonight. Images of aborted foetuses at various stages of development are also shown in uncompromising graphic detail. According to filmmaker Julia Black, this is not a gratuitous attempt to shock but a serious attempt to present the reality of abortion and open up debate on what still remains a taboo subject.

The 35-year-old has always been staunchly pro-choice, which is not surprising as her father is Dr Tim Black, founder of Marie Stopes International - Britain's largest provider of abortions outside the NHS. Black had an abortion at the age of 21. Last year, she became pregnant again and it made her think about what she had done 14 years earlier.

Although she had well-rehearsed reasons as to why abortion was a woman's right to choose, she hadn't ever tested them. She wanted to know whether she could face all the facts about abortion and remain pro-choice. My Foetus charts her voyage of discovery.

One in three British women has an abortion at some point in their lives - around 180,000 a year - but the subject is rarely discussed in public. The pro-choice movement argues that abortion is a fact of life, a woman's right but resists showing the reality of the procedure.

Writing for the Pro-choice Forum, she says: "When I began to make this film over a year ago I set out to explore the rights of the woman versus the rights of the foetus and use my pregnancy as a vehicle to do so. I started doing research and found that many people in the pro-choice camp had been saying for a number of years that we had to be more honest about what abortion actually is.

"As I was pregnant I was following the development of my foetus very closely and for the first time in my life actually began to listen to the other side of the argument."

The programme has drawn mixed reactions from pro-life campaigners. The ProLife Alliance called Channel 4's decision to screen the images "hypocritical" after the channel refused to broadcast images of aborted foetuses which formed part of its party election broadcasts in the 1997 and 2001 general elections.

But others, including Archbishop Peter Smith, of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, have given a cautious welcome to the documentary, which they believe could provide a "powerful anti-abortion message".

Nuala Scarisbrick, trustee of the charity Life, says: "Whilst the thought of this programme is abhorrent, people should know the realities of an abortion. People must realise that what they are watching is the deliberate killing of an unborn child. If it opens up the abortion debate in an honest and balanced manner it could be helpful."

Black's intention, she says, was not to deter women from having abortions, but to bring the truth about the procedure out into the open and allow women to make up their own minds. The pro-life lobby has always argued that you cannot know all the facts about abortion and remain pro-choice. Black wanted to test the argument, both on herself and viewers.

She admits what she found during the course of her research made her uncomfortable, as it will many viewers.

During the film, she interviews an American pro-life campaigner who drives a huge truck with images of aborted foetuses plastered across the back and sides. These are the first images the viewer sees and they're clearly designed to shock.

She also interviews Professor Stuart Campbell, a pioneer in 3-D ultrasound scanning. The film shows pictures of foetuses taken at nine, 12, 18 and 23 weeks, all within the legal deadline for abortion. They look like babies, they suck their thumbs, and although Prof Campbell is pro-choice, he believes the limit for so-called social terminations - those carried out for non-medical reasons - should be moved from 24 to 12 weeks.

A change in the law is not out of the question. In 1990, the legal limit was reduced from 28 to 24 weeks to take into account recent medical advances that meant a premature baby could survive outside the womb from that point. Black says she has no views on the subject but hopes My Foetus will prompt discussion.

She says: "I hope that the debate will now move away from asking whether abortion should be shown on television and for society to start debating - now that we have the facts - should we go back to before 1967 and make it illegal and give the foetus more rights than the woman, or should we move forward and accept that it's a woman's right to choose what happens to her body?"

This is the view of 31-year-old Lorna. Like the woman in the film, she had an abortion at four weeks, although she used the abortion pill. The Sunderland-based management consultant had just been promoted when she discovered she was pregnant in 2001 and wasn't ready to have a baby.

Three years later, she has a four-month old son.

"Personally, I have no regrets but it's not something I'm proud of. I made the decision that was best for me at the time. It took a while to come to terms with it properly but I can't see myself doing anything else," she says.

"I think this film is probably a good thing. People have to know what it's about but then I think women who have an abortion know what it's about anyway. It's not a pleasant thing but sometimes you have to make tough decisions.

"What I don't agree with is when people use it as an emergency form of contraception. You do have the right to decide whether you have a baby or not but you also have to be responsible for your own actions."

My Foetus will certainly make women think twice about abortion. Even Black, who was utterly convinced about the arguments in favour of a woman's right to termination, found her views shaken during the filming, but she concludes that she is still pro-choice.

"For me after having made this film, pro-choice now means not being afraid to talk about the reality of abortion, or about having had one and not hiding it within the politically correct slogan of reproductive rights. If we really believe there is nothing wrong with abortion - which I still do - then let's be up front about it."

* My Foetus is on Channel 4 tonight at 11pm.