London - More women will recognise the situation than will want to admit it. You’re young and a little tipsy, a delightful guy chats you up, you drink some more and end up at one or other’s flat.
Then you dance and laugh and drink some more... ending up in bed together. In the morning, you can hardly remember what happened, let alone whether you used contraception.
Have you been there? I have, all of 47 years ago, in my first year of university. Some things don’t change, do they?
Of course, we all know such behaviour is not to be encouraged - not least because it could end in not just tears, but a baby or an abortion.
And that’s the subject of a wonderful new film causing controversy in America, which has just opened here.
Obvious Child tells the truth about abortion and that’s something few women would shout openly and which pro-life groups would rather suppress.
For the fact is that for many people who have had one, including myself, an abortion is no big deal.
Not that the film treats the topic frivolously. Far from it. The bitter-sweet comedy tells the story of how Donna Stern, an edgy comedian in Brooklyn who has just been dumped by her boyfriend, has a one-night stand - and then finds herself pregnant.
At 28, she’s better at cracking dubious jokes about flatulence and knickers in her weekly stand-up routine at a comedy club than doing her taxes. Watching her made me wince and cringe, but she is undeniably real.
With her parents nudging her to take control of her life, this kooky, unglamorous Jewish girl has a lot of growing up to do. Unsettled, immature, newly jobless and horrified at the thought of having a baby, she sees no choice - she wants an abortion.
When the clinic advises her to think carefully about it, she replies with a seriousness we haven’t yet seen: “I have thought about it and this is what I want to do.”
Touchingly, Donna discovers that her super-efficient, academic mother is not furious (as she expected). She confesses that when she was a student in the Sixties and abortions were illegal, she, too, went through the procedure.
It was the right thing for her to do at that time, she says, and she knows that it is right for her daughter.
I realise that my use of the word “right” will make some people furious. What’s more, talking about this film requires using the words “comedy” and “abortion” in the same sentence, which is bound to greatly anger those who object to abortion on moral and religious grounds.
America’s pro-life movement has attacked the film and I’m sure it will be controversial here, too. But I must point out that it does not tell a single joke about abortion.
On the contrary, it shows a woman whose repertoire of crass jokiness covers up her inner vulnerability. She wants to be loved, but messes up.
I recognise Donna - she is like so many people I’ve known and others who write to my Saturday advice column. Because of that I certainly don’t judge her.
When you reach the tender ending of the film, you realise that her decision to have an abortion as early as possible was wise and, yes, right.
This is not about a ‘lifestyle choice’. It is about realising that the decision to bring a child into this world is the most serious you can make.
Which is worse: to bring an unwanted baby into a chaotic life or to terminate the pregnancy at the earliest possible moment?
Unfortunately, far too many young women make the first choice, and society is paying an appalling price.
To me, the “crime” is being reckless with your fertility and then irresponsibly and stupidly dithering so long about an unwanted pregnancy that an abortion is carried out very late.
I would probably support a move to legislate that the abortion limit of 24 weeks (established in 1990) is too high.
But I still have no doubt that women have the right to choose an early abortion and that they are usually wise to do so.
One of the most interesting things about Obvious Child is that Donna’s feelings about abortion are not over-dramatised.
I have received letters to my advice column expressing guilt at abortions carried out years earlier - and naturally I sympathise. What else can I do?
Yet there is another side: those women who know they have made the right decision and vow to get on with their lives.
In a touching and true moment in the film, Donna asks her supportive best friend, who had an abortion years earlier, whether she thinks about it often.
She replies without hesitation: “I think about it sometimes - once in a while - and then I get sad. But I never regret it.”
I can honestly say I’ve never felt sad about having a very early termination at the end of 1980. My son was born in 1974, smaller than average and treated in special care. Then in 1975 I endured 16 hours of labour delivering a stillborn son at full term.
In January 1980, I had my daughter prematurely by caesarean section, contracted a dangerous infection and heard a succession of bleak warnings from doctors about my baby’s health.
The prognosis was uncertain and the future looked frightening and exhausting in equal measure - though at the time I had no way of predicting just how hard it would be.
That’s why, 11 months after my daughter’s birth and pregnant again at the age of 34, I was so relieved to hear my new GP tell me: “If you were my daughter, I would counsel a termination.”
We’d moved house to give the children a better life in the country, I’d mislaid my Pills during the chaos and bingo.
Like Donna in the film, I was thoughtful, but determined about having an abortion.
And from that day until this, I have never experienced a moment of regret about that decision. For the sake of my health and in order to care for my sick child, it was the right thing to do. The night before the abortion, Donna has a gig at the comedy club. Her chaotic life is the material for her act, but this time she plays it almost straight and tells her audience about the pregnancy and abortion.
You can sense that the women in the audience are relieved to hear such honesty and the men respond to it, too, with warm applause.
I found it moving when she concludes her act: “I think it’s gonna be OK and afterwards... I’ll be in my future... and, you know, we’ll go from there.”
It seems to me that such an attitude is healthy. Sometimes I feel frustrated by the modern tendency to rachet up every single emotional upset into a trauma that will require counselling and scar you for ever.
Equally irritating is the refusal to admit there are degrees of seriousness, which is why when a judge or commentator suggests that date rape is less horrific than gang rape there is an hysterical outcry of indignation.
I believe it diminishes the very real suffering of parents who have nursed a sick child who dies in their arms to treat an early miscarriage or abortion (and I have had both) as a life-changing heartache you will nurse for ever.
People suffer terrible things and somehow continue to live with courage and determination.
No advice columnist likes thoughtless cliches such as “Get over it” and “Move on”.
Yet sometimes we have to accept what happens to us - accept the sadness as well as the change and continue with life.
That’s what Obvious Child makes you realise: we all make mistakes and have to deal with the consequences, but that doesn’t mean there is no possibility of a happy ending.
You have to embrace the fact you will be “in your future” - and cope. Just as I did, and just as many thousands of women have, whether they will admit it or not. - Daily Mail