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Should women have the right to choose abortion? The answer is an emphatic yes they should, and I can see two reasons, broadly speaking, why this is so.

But before I get to these reasons, I want to stress that we're talking about human lives here. A foetus is not a tumor or an appendix or a fingernail. It is a potential human being (or an actual human being, depending on what criteria you use.) Terminating a foetus - no, let's be honest, killing a foetus is not an act that can be carried out lightly. It should not be some sort of routine or automatic procedure, like an inoculation. It should be a last resort, carried out when the alternative - carrying the child to term - is worse. It's like a safety net beneath a high-wire act at a circus. You'd never really want to use that option, if you could avoid it at all. But the safety net should be there.

The decision to abort, hard though it is, is made even harder by the fact that Nature tends to be analogue, not digital. There is no obvious cut-off point, just a continuum ranging from an egg and a sperm at one end, to a new-born baby at the other. Where should the line be drawn? At 20 weeks? 24 weeks? As is often the case in real life, there is no very clear answer - we just do our best with the information we have at the time. One thing is certain though - wherever we draw that line, someone will always say that we should have drawn it somewhere else, or not drawn it at all.

But yes, abortion should be there as an option. Firstly, if it is made illegal, women will still choose to do it. The difference will be that it won't take place in hygienic, safe surroundings. If abortion is against the law, desperate women will go to backstreet abortionists, and the really desperate will attempt it solo. Do we really want to find teenage girls dying in pools of blood in toilet cubicles? In the western world, in the 21st century? I don't think we do.

My second reason has to do with women and their bodies. I am surprised when some of the more vociferous opponents of abortion turn out to be men, and I suspect I know what I'd say to them, were I a woman. "You go through what women go through," I'd say. "You go through the inconvenience of menstruation, the challenges of pregnancy, the risks of childbirth. Then - and only then - will I pay much attention to your opinions."

In the West, the progress of women to attain the same rights as men has been a long, hard struggle over the years, but it is possible sometimes to lose sight of

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