If we want to understand why thousands of women a year in England and Wales have an abortion – 251,377 in 2022, so probably way more now – we could do worse than consider the musings of the singer Lily Allen on the subject.

In a podcast chat with her friend Miquita, this took a musical turn. She began singing to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’: ‘Abortions I’ve had a few… but then again… I can’t remember exactly how many’. Giggling, she continued: ‘I can’t remember. I think maybe like, I want to say four or five.’  

Miqiuta – a woman of whom I’d never heard – observed that, whaddya know, she’d had about five too: ‘I’m so happy I can say that and you can say it and no one came to shoot us down, no judgement. We’ve had about the same amount of abortions.’

As far as Lily is concerned, she used to ‘get pregnant all the time’. Belatedly she had an IUD coil fitted, which sorted out the problem, but you have to wonder, might she have thought of that earlier? Whatever; she’s fine about her abortions and rather impatient with the sort of people who feel they have to justify them. For her it’s ‘Just: ‘I don’t want a f***ing baby right now.’ Literally: ‘“Don’t want a baby” is enough reason.’

And there you have it, folks. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the terms of the Abortion Act 1967 so thoroughly trashed. Sir David Steel, if you’re reading, how does it make you feel? Because under the actual legislation, according to the government, ‘a pregnancy may be lawfully terminated by a registered medical practitioner, in approved premises, if two medical practitioners are of the opinion, formed in good faith, that the abortion is justified under one or more grounds.’

Of the grounds it mentions, all but 2 per cent are justified under the following criterion:

‘That the pregnancy has not exceeded its 24th week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman.’

So, two practitioners, likely justified each of Lily’s five abortions on the basis that continuing with the pregnancy would have risked injury to her physical or mental health. And in all but a very few cases we’re talking about mental health. And now here’s proof, if anyone needed it, that absolutely anything, but anything, qualifies. If Lily says she doesn’t want to be pregnant, end of. Literally.

Sometimes, you have to wonder if the sex education to which young people are subjected in British schools is a bit deficient. Actually scrap that – I think the problem may be with the biology classes. Because the bit of the textbook that describes the foetal journey from zygote to looking like a kidney bean – but with discernibly human characteristics – right up to the curled-up baby that is about to make its way into the world may not have made sufficiently clear that it’s a process without any obvious breaks. There isn’t a point where the foetus all of a sudden has an existential moment and finds it is human. That, as Peter Jones pointed out in this magazine, was an Aristotle thing; he thought that the foetus sprang into full humanity at 40 days (90 for girls). Perhaps Lily has a similar approach, whereby she feels that the foetus is only human if she says it is. That is, if the pregnancy is wanted. Otherwise, it’s an inconvenience.

It’s this caprice that drives me nuts. A foetus is simply a human being in the process of development and growth. It doesn’t become human if it’s a wanted pregnancy; it just is. And if you kill it – because, I am afraid, that is what abortion entails – then you’re committing a kind of pre-natal homicide. Many people think that it’s justifiable in ‘crisis’ pregnancies, but there’s no getting away from it; abortion is a morally weighty act.

Obviously abortion is more distressing and more unpleasant to all concerned, including the foetus, if the later pregnancy is advanced, and most abortions happen by ten-weeks’ gestation – though over 500 happen after 22 weeks in case of disability. But terminating the life of a prenatal human being is serious; it’s not something to do lightly. And it’s not something for a bloody girly podcast where neither party seems to understand what’s entailed. Miquita described her abortion as her ‘contraceptive journey’ which makes you wonder whether all that sex education was wasted.

After the Antoniazzi amendment was passed the other week, whereby MPs gave women a free pass to do absolutely anything in terms of her own pregnancy right up to birth (‘these women should be treated with care and compassion’), I was on a radio programme with a woman journalist who’d had an abortion at over five weeks and declared that she was really troubled by the fact that abortion wasn’t decriminalised under the Abortion Act; rather it was allowed in only exceptional circumstances. This, she felt, was a stigma which bothered her. But what this podcast makes clear is that the stigma is illusory, as illusory as the terms of the Abortion Act. Lily doesn’t care; she minds that there are weird people out there who think she should. And so this female Moloch went on to see off her ‘four or five’ pregnancies before finally having two delightful girls, Ethel and Marnie, with her ex-husband.

She doesn’t see that it’s a problem. And that, folks, is why there are up to a quarter of a million abortions a year, and counting, even at a time when contraception is practically forced on teenagers. Lots and lots and lots of people don’t think it matters. But it does.

PS. The really interesting feature of the report on this on Mail online is that it involves no censure of anyone involved. The Antoniazzi amendment is written up in the article as a liberating development. Readers affected by the issues are invited to get in touch with BPAS, the abortion provider. Once, the Mail would have been outraged. That it apparently isn’t, tells us everything.