Melanie McDonagh

Brian Sewell once wrote an article about abortion headlined: ‘Women, the killers in our midst.’ He got an awful lot of flak for it, which he took in his stride. He came to mind during the screening of Abortion On Trial, the documentary hosted by Anne Robinson and screened this week to mark the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act. In it, one of the participants described abortion as murder. ‘Are nine of us here… murderers?’ asked Mrs Robinson with a flourish, to which the only tactful answer was no, of course not. Brian would unhesitatingly have said yes. Abortion is one of those issues about which dissent is not normally socially permissible right now; see what happened to Jacob Rees-Mogg.

My old college, formerly known as New Hall, is women-only for its undergraduates. But now the term is expanding, as so often these days, to include anyone who, at the time of application, 'identifies as female', as well as the non-binary, those who really can’t make up their minds. During my time in college, I shared a room with another girl; quite what it would have been like to share with someone aspiring to being a woman I don’t know…presumably entirely non-threatening but a bit odd. The point about this women-only college is that it was meant to provide a bit of gender balance to the male majority in the overall university population – which must by now be getting near parity.

Is it possible that London commuters are now unable to tell the difference between the cry of God is Great, Allahu Akbar - a sentiment that unfortunately accompanies every IS atrocity - and the actual Bible? It seems like it from the reaction on the Shepperton to Waterloo service at 8.30am yesterday. As one report put it, 'a man with a rucksack began reciting what seemed to be passages from the Old Testament. He apparently declared homosexuality and pre-marital sex to be a sin.' Or as one commuter put it, 'Some nutter starts reciting verses from the Bible… and causes such panic that some people have forced open the doors and jumped onto the tracks. He recited lines about homosexuality and sex outside marriage being a sin. God gave his only son for our sins etc.

You have to try really hard to get any idea of what the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby actually said in his interview for the BBC Today programme, the one where he said the BBC had acted with less integrity than the Church of England or the Catholic church when it came to the abuse of children by Jimmy Savile. You may well have heard that part because it is what the BBC itself reported on its own news broadcasts and duly, every other news outlet followed its lead. And the reason you can’t put the remarks in context is that the interview itself hasn’t yet been broadcast – it’s part of a series of interviews with prominent people for the 60th anniversary of the programme next month.

Last December, Lavinia Woodward threw a laptop at her boyfriend and stabbed him in the lower leg with a breadknife, and injured two of his fingers. She then tried to stab herself with the knife before he disarmed her. For unlawful wounding, this medical student at Christchurch Oxford, could have got a three-year prison sentence; instead she got a 10-month sentence suspended for 18 months on Monday. The judge, Ian Pringle, when he first heard the case, observed that a custodial sentence would harm her career. Quite. And he declared, as he handed down the suspended sentence, that there were 'many, many mitigating factors' in the case, and the injuries inflicted were 'relatively minor'.

There are any number of reasons to feel irritated about the reaction to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s frankly expressed views about abortion – which hold that it’s wrong in all cases, including rape. One is the entirely characteristic, reflexive intolerance of his opponents: see Suzanne Moore’s piece in the Guardian to the effect that the abortion stuff is all of a piece with being a quasi fascist, that being a Catholic pro-lifer is part and parcel of being 'a neoconservative bigot', and that his views on benefits and zero hours contracts are more of the same package. Except of course they’re not; they’re separate issues. But part of my own irritation is to do with the nature of the debate itself.

Which, do you reckon, is more repellent – the decision by Tower Hamlets, a borough rotten to the marrow, to place a Christian child with two successive Muslim foster parents of uncompromising Islamic views, or its reaction to the Times’ coverage of the story yesterday, with a council spokesman saying that its fostering service “provides a loving, stable home for hundreds of children every year”? Both, I’d say, are par for the course.

Getting agitated, are you, about declining sperm counts? The Guardian called the fall in numbers 'shocking'; for the Telegraph, never one to underplay these things, 'Sperm count collapse could spell doom for humanity'. Really? It feels like one of those stories about species extinction, helped by the undeniable resemblance of spermatozoa to tadpoles. You may have noticed that women are markedly less agitated about all this than men, at least the three I spoke to. For once – hah – it’s not women who have all the angst about procreation. All the Bridget Jones business about body clocks, biological sell-by dates and egg freezing was formerly the preserve of women. Now men can share the grief…welcome, progenitors.

God, she’s on a bit of a run, Justine Greening, isn’t she? A day after it turns out she wants to let people change gender merely on their say so, without regard to their possession of wombs or gonads or XX chromosomes, she’s set her sights on the CofE and its retrograde attitude to gender – actually, come to think of it, she’s probably got the entire Christian communion in her sights. All in her capacity of Education Secretary and Women and Equalities Minister. She observed in an interview on Sky: 'I think it is important that the church in a way keeps up and is part of a modern country. I wouldn’t prescribe to them how they should deal with that.

Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook could be to its users what churches are to congregations: it could help them feel part of ‘a more connected world’. That got a dusty response. Facebook as church, eh? So the man who helped an entire generation to replace real friends with virtual ones and online communities is sounding off about people feeling unconnected? Cause and effect or what? He wasn’t quite touting Facebook as an alternative church.

We all know that advertising is the work of the devil – creating entirely spurious wants, including in small children – but making it gender neutral doesn’t help. The Advertising Standards Authority is extending its brief to ensure that advertising does not confirm unhelpful sex stereotypes. That is to say, it is going to ban advertisements suggesting that little girls want to be ballerinas (Aptamil) or showing Lynda Bellingham at the stove (Bisto). Guy Parker of the ASA says, 'advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole'; the ASA will make sure it does by stigmatising the offenders.

You know, the quality on which the British pride themselves, pragmatism, has its limits. There’s a case for abstract moral thinking and it’s especially true when it comes to the fraught moral question of euthanasia, assisted suicide, right-to-die, whatever. And essentially the distinction is between actively killing someone, or allowing them to die – of doing something, as opposed to not doing something, of commission rather than omission. The little ditty by Arthur Hugh Clough, 'thou shalt not kill but needst not strive/ officiously to keep alive' sort of sums it up.

You know a Man Having Baby story really would be a story if it were true. But the latest Man Mother story is only true if you accept the notion that the mother in question really is a man. And that depends on whether you go down the whole notion that being transgender involves biological reinvention, rather than hormonal/surgical intervention plus credulity and the creative use of language. Two people with wombs, ovaries and XX chromosomes, conventionally known as women, have had babies. As it happens, one of them has taken drugs to suppress lactation on the basis of an unwillingness to breastfeed, but, you know, it took drugs to stop the otherwise natural process of breast milk production.

Now Donald Trump really has done it. He’s cutting nearly half the budget of the Fulbright programme, the fund that has paid for 12,000 Brits to travel to the US to study and for a corresponding number of Americans to come here. Given that the beneficiaries include people who’ve done terrifically well for themselves - alumni and alumnae include Bill Clinton, Yvette Cooper, Onora O'Neill, Liam Byrne MP, the philosopher, and, er, Sylvia Plath – there has been a corresponding fuss. Some of the beneficiaries have written to The Times to suggest that the cuts will “devastate the programme and damage irrevocably the most successful cultural diplomacy initiative in the history of the United States.” Well, maybe, maybe not.