I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long, grinding poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

I don’t understand, then, why, in the midst of all this, pregnant women - women trying to make rational decisions about their futures and, usually, that of their families, too - should be subject to more pressure about preserving life than, say, Vladimir Putin, the World Bank, or the Catholic Church.