Melanie McDonagh

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.

It’ll be news, I expect, to most people that the BMA wants abortion to be decriminalised. Most people probably didn’t know it was a criminal offence in the first place. And you’ll be hearing a lot from women who’ve had abortions about how it’s obviously not a criminal matter but a mere medical procedure. Nothing criminal or moral about it. In fact there’s a section of the commentariat who employ a familiar syllogism in these cases: 1. I have had an abortion; 2. I am a good person; 3. Abortion is therefore not wrong. The BMA is going down this route with its vote today, that abortion is not a matter for the criminal law but is a medical procedure.

It’s very weird when a friend is in the news. I’ve known Nicholas Holgate for years. Until now, he was Town Clerk for Kensington and Chelsea council. I would say this, but he’s one of the most decent people I know; think rock-solid integrity, think public service. He was in the Treasury for years before moving to the council; central government’s loss, local government's gain, I thought at the time. And he’s a Liberal Democrat, though he had to sit on that while he worked in government. Anyway, he’s the one person in the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire who has had to resign in consequence of what happened; not so much obliged to fall on his sword from the looks of things, as have Sajid Javid push him down onto it.