During a day of excellent presentations on the question of “How can a state control swallowing?” on medical abortion and the law, organised by Prof Sally Sheldon of Kent University Law School, an unexpected question was asked from the floor, during the session I chaired: “Just because it [abortion] is easy doesn’t mean it’s right: do you agree?”

The questioner did not at that stage state his views but the question sounded, even on the surface, anti-abortion. I decided to respond myself. Of course not, I said. But no matter what aspect of reproductive health we look at, tradition as developed by the law and the medical profession has been to make things as difficult for women as possible. When doing surgical abortions, pain relief is often not offered at all, or too little is offered or too late. When pain relief during labour and delivery was finally developed in the 20th century, many were against it because the Old Testament talks about Eve being punished for her sin by having to suffer pain during labour and delivery. And although contemporary abortion methods, both manual vacuum aspiration and medical abortion, are extremely easy to provide, are very safe, take very little time and are very low tech, they are fenced in with a huge range of barriers and regulations. Gynaecologists in many countries still insist on using D&C, which takes much more time and skills, requires general anaesthetic and an overnight stay in hospital, as well as carrying a higher risk of complications. The fact that WHO has not recommended using D&C for something like two decades makes no difference. In short, things are often made as difficult for women as possible when it comes to pregnancy, and especially when it comes to abortion.

This is the same kind of myth as the one which says: if you make abortion easily available, everyone will want to have one. Thus confusing abortion with ice cream or sweets.

What I should have said, in order to keep the exchange as succinct as possible, was: “It doesn’t make it wrong either…”.

In fact, it’s wonderful for women that abortion has become so easy. Now all we need to do is liberate it from those who will use any means they can find ‒ out-of-date laws, punitive morality, clinically unjustified regulations, and even bald-faced lies ‒ to keep it difficult.