I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species, we´ve fairy 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 show 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 a 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.

However, what I do belive to be genuinely sacred – and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole – is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral that bringing an unwanted child into this world.

a) Do you have a vagina? and b) Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said ´yes´ to both, then congratulations! You´re a feminist.

What I am vexed with is the idea that, by having an abourtion, a woman is somehow being unfemale and, indeed, unmotherly. That the absolute essence of womanhood and maternity is to sustain life, at all costs, whatever the situation.

But then, I do understand why women started to reject the word ´feminism´. It ended up being invoked in so many bafflingly inappropriate contexts that – if you weren´t actually aware of the core aims of feminism, and were trying to work it out simply from the surrounding conversation – you´d presume it was some spectacularly unappealing combination of misandry, misery and hypocrisy, which stood for ugly clothes, constant anger and, let´s face it, no fucking

A couple of years ago, the voluminously lipped sex-minx du jour Scarlett Johansson revealed that she called her breasts 'my girls'. 'I like my body and face,' she said, echoing the thoughts of all but the blind, 'and I love my breasts - I call them "my girls".' Not for the first time in her career*, Johansson had raised a vexed issue. What, exactly, can a grown woman of sense and wit call her tits?

*In Lost in Translation, she presented us with the question, 'Is it ever right not to have sex with Bill Murray during a trip to Japan?', to which anyone with any sense was able to answer, 'No - you must always have sex with Bill Murray when you are on a trip to Japan.'