Convenience seems a small, mean word – but sometimes it’s all we’ve got

The reason why everybody gets so shrill over abortion, I’ve often thought, is that nobody is quite prepared to admit what they are talking about. By which I don’t mean ‘the slaughter of babies’. I mean the pros and cons of a system of morality that is coldly utilitarian, and nothing else.

Oh God, you’re probably thinking. Not abortion. We’ve already read a cover article about that. Can’t you write about something else, with some laughs in it? British agents pretending not to realise when they hand people over to tyrants for torture, for example? And I won’t lie, I thought about that, and I had a particularly nice gag lined up about a man from MI6 claiming not to realise that bears shat in the woods (‘We were given assurances, by the bears, that they had invested in a chemical toilet’) but, as MPs debate the Health and Social Care Bill, and the shrieking begins in earnest, it’s abortion which has grasped my goat.