Some abortion stories are just too bad to be true. That was my first reaction to a book published this week called Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict. In it, American woman Irene Vilar analyses a 17-year stretch of her life in which she claims to have had 15 abortions.

Then, wonder of wonders, she actually managed to have two children. I would have thought that after 15 sessions of scraping and suctioning her womb would have been a pretty inhospitable place for a baby. Numerous studies have shown that women have an increased risk of very premature delivery after only one abortion.’

But then, Mrs Vilar is an extraordinary woman all round: an intellectual prodigy (she got into Syracuse University at only 15) she is now reportedly a successful literary agent (although 51 publishers rejected her own book) and comes from a Puerto Rican family marked by drama and tragedy to an amazing degree. Her grandmother spent 25 years in prison for storming the US Capitol building with a gun; her mother suffered depression after being (involuntarily?) sterilised in an American-led experiment and killed herself when Irene was 8; two of her brothers became heroin addicts.

This is all truly dreadful and it would account for Mrs Vilar, at the age of 17, falling into a destructive marriage with a 50-year-old professor who did not want children, for the abortions (I guess the records are somewhere) and for several suicide attempts. But it’s her explanation of her mental state during these years that stretches credulity:

“My testimony explored how more often than not the agency and power of fecundity can be alluring to women split about their capacities as mothers and as professionals -- the plight of many modern women -- resulting in impossible motherhood "syndromes" that act out old childhood hurts, the full sense of which cannot begin to be grasped without examining one's history and one's own complicity. My neurotic behaviors were extreme, my pathology difficult to identify with, yet in the almost grotesque extent of my destructive actions as I forgot to take my pills time after time to indulge in the fantasy of potential motherhood, I was convinced I had put my finger on something. Fifteen pregnancies, most of them in one romance gone sour while married to a college professor thirty four years my senior, were fifteen "highs" charting an imaginary path of control and empowerment that resulted in fifteen despairing terminations.”

Well, maybe. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially when it gives birth to the prospect of a sensational book. Mrs Vilar told the UK Daily Mail this week she is “worried about my safety and the hate mail” from anti-abortionists. “I just imagine the ‘baby killer’ stuff and I could be a poster girl for that kind of fundamentalism,” she said. If so, she only has herself to blame; she could have kept quiet about her ugly past and spared her new husband and children (including two step children) the publicity too.

She could also have chosen a more accurate and less provocative title for her book. It is clear from what she says that if she was addicted to anything it was pregnancy, not abortion. People become addicted to what they perceive is good (motherhood), not to the nasty treatment (abortion). It is just too silly to speak of being “addicted to abortion” -- unless you are a publisher wanting to push buttons.

Which brings me back to my initial scepticism about this “testimony”. It sounds highly contrived and unlikely to lead to any real insights into the psychology of women having repeat abortions. Mrs Vilar herself seems to have learned nothing profound abortion. She told the Daily Mail: “Motherhood has made me feel accountable.” (To whom?) “It hasn’t made me less pro-choice.”

What a waste of experience.