A society in which a woman has no right to choose abortion would be a morally stunted one, fit to take its place with those patriarchal, medievalist theocracies where women remain the chattels of men and bigotry is law.

As a devoutly secular Brit, I resent and reject the assumption that faith and morality are synonymous. I therefore believe that the pro-choice position is not a loosening of morals; it is rather a moral position founded in human reality rather than unthinking religious dogma.

Human fertility is a gift, a gift that by fluke of biology some decent people of my acquaintance were denied. Yet my day job has brought me into contact with the worst society has to offer, third generation drunks, thieves, robbers and junkies, most of whom are amazingly fertile. Conceived with all the care and thought that would go into a sneeze, I met many screaming infants who, to paraphrase Dickens, would have screamed all the louder had they known what life had in store for them. Most of these tots were doomed to follow their parents into lives of misery, crime, social alienation and early deaths. Mysterious ways indeed.

I’m not for a second suggesting termination on the basis of a parent’s social status. I do however believe that quality of life matters more than life alone. If a young woman without the means or desire to raise a child sought an abortion at an early stage, which is better for the woman and her society? An unwanted child that might have a miserable life while ruining hers and making both a burden to society; or the termination of a being that is certainly alive but a long way from being a sentient human.

The debate on how and where human life begins is a tangled one, and even within the pro-life movement there are those who favour early term abortions. Yet organised religion has always found it easy to sand the rough edges off difficult moral questions and the view that a human life is created at the point of conception still holds sway for millions.

Unflinching devotion to dogma so often leads to great cruelty. The Catholic Church hasn’t been persuaded to deviate from its pro-life prohibition of contraception by the deaths of tens of millions of Africans from HIV. Can it really be the case that those who fail to practice abstinence deserve agonising death? Does a 21st century pontiff really still believe that we should be controlled by our fertility and not vice versa, however appalling the cost? Would those sufficiently devoted to this principle to target abortion clinics accept that they’re placing more value on the life of a Western foetus than on an adult HIV-sufferer in South Africa?

Curtailing the right to abortion wouldn’t prevent unwanted pregnancies and enforce sexual abstinence any more than prohibition slaked the USA’s thirst for liquor. A society can’t be that easily reshaped by a minority whose views are so at odds with the views and inclinations of the majority. Yet this minority would doubtless be happy to see young women bear the burden of their principles, either by gambling with their lives in backstreet clinics, languishing in jails for the sin of being human, or giving up their aspirations for an unwanted child, regardless of whether the child is severely disabled or the product of rape.

Why does the pro-life cause entail such tunnel-vision? Artificial termination is not without a natural precedent: Miscarriages occur when the body makes its own brutal decision that a foetus isn’t viable. Is that life more or less sacred for the lack of human choice? Should it be seen as God’s will and therefore beyond question? If human life is so sacred, what of pro-lifers who serve in the armed forces, own guns or drive cars? They are after all gambling with their own lives and the lives of others.

Shouldn’t pro-lifers spend a bit more time protesting outside army bases, munitions factories or the Vatican? It is telling that their supposed concern for human life doesn’t extend beyond spitting biblical venom at desperate young women and the medical practitioners who brave harassment and violence to help them.