So far as I know (and this subject has been on my mind for over 25 years), this is the first time since the development of abortion by vacuum curettage in the 1960s – and David Steele’s Abortion Act of 1967 which made that simple, safe technology available to all women under the NHS – that any legislature has given consideration to the possibility that a man who has effected a pregnancy ought to be accorded a voice in its termination. Up until now, men’s views and feelings on this issue have been absolutely inadmissible; and where any man has tried to raise his voice he will have been denounced – as I have been – as an enemy of “a woman’s inalienable right to choose”.