Junior Doctor Nicole Piper is currently acting as a surrogate for her friend in Casualty.

Casualty’s Nicole Piper (played by Sammy T. Dobson) receives life changing news in next week’s episode (Saturday May 25) of the BBC medical drama, when she learns that the baby she is carrying has Down’s Syndrome. The junior doctor is acting as a surrogate for her friend Rosie (Nicola Chegwin) and up to this point, has been extremely matter of fact about the pregnancy.

However, speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, actress Sammy admits this moment changes everything. “I think she’s very much [initally] convinced that it doesn’t change anything. Or it won’t change anything for Rosie because she’s known Rosie her entire life so she thinks she knows how she operates. And she thinks well yeah, this may be not what we planned but that’s okay. It’s just a different plan now, so I’ll carry on have the baby and then it’s still fine, and she’s still thinking a bit in terms of that.

“Whereas Rosie’s gone: ‘Hang on. I’m a single mum and disabled. To then take on a disabled child as well. This is a completely different situation to the one we started with. You can’t just assume I’m okay with that and everything is going to carry on in the same way’.

“Nicole absolutely buries her head in the sand [thinking], ‘no no but it will be fine, of course, it’ll be fine, it’s going to be fine’. Whereas Rosie doesn’t feel the same at all about that. But, Nicole is also stuck with an ever-growing baby and an ever-nearing deadline as to that baby being born, and it becomes more and more real for her the longer things go on.”

Prior to this devastating news, Nicole had been having a very relaxed pregnancy, and has been very focused on the fact that she is handing the baby over at the end of the gestation period. Now, she has to face some big decisions with very few options available to her.

Nicole Piper receives some worrying news in Casualty (Image: BBC)

“Well, there’s only a few different ways it could go really. So either – in her head, she has no plan to keep this baby – so either Rosie keeps the baby as planned or she has to get rid of the baby.

“So she’s then faced with something that was never on the table at the start, which is if you’ve never planned to be a mother and you plan to become pregnant for a friend you never consider abortion. Why would you?

“Now these are the options laid in front of her. Certainly she’s never had to think about it, and suddenly that makes it entirely more real.

“What if one of those options is you’re now going to have to get rid of that baby? You’ve now got a battle with all sorts of things about how you feel about that. There’s a human being inside you, which is not a great time to have to make that decision, although it’s when many people have to make that decision,” Nicole reasons.

The third option is that Nicole raises the baby, which is something the medic also hasn’t prepared for. “It’s changed it completely. Am I now going to have to be more involved because she’s going to need more help? Am I now going to have to have a surgical procedure? This could be my baby now. You know, that’s that’s one of the different ways this could play out. Could it be incredibly difficult, because I’m a single mum now and all the rest of it,” she ponders.

Nicole Piper is carrying a baby for her friend Rosie (Image: BBC)

While viewers will have to wait and see how the storyline plays out, Sammy believes it is very brave of the show to tackle such a huge subject. “Something that came up while we were filming, because the baby has Down’s Syndrome, there’s something in the script that people thought was a mistake, and that was the fact that you can abort a fetus with Down’s Syndrome up until 40 weeks.

“Everyone on set thought that was a mistake, and it isn’t, and it’s amazing how many people are unaware that that is the case. So I think it’s actually incredibly brave of Casualty to put that in front of people.

“I think it is really interesting how few people are aware of that, and how few people are unaware of the law regarding surrogacy, because it isn’t actually the surrogate’s decision as to whether that baby gets aborted or not, it is the person you’re having the baby for.

“They can they can incite legal proceedings to say, ‘I don’t want this anymore, so I want you to have this aborted, and if you choose not to, this is not my problem’. I think [it is] much darker than people would imagine.”