Narratives matter. They help us to frame a concept, to personalise a debate, to prevent academia from getting lost in the clouds of theory. However, a narrative alone cannot be an argument for or against a larger position. A narrative can be used to frame a problem, but cannot be used to solve it.

This is probably the largest of the many errors Mehdi Hasan makes in his Huffington Post UK piece, Being pro-life doesn't make me any less of a lefty. To be fair, Hasan doesn't lead with his narrative, but he does make it clear, once we reach that point in the article, that his personal experience informs his entire worldview on the choice of abortion. He says:

"I would be opposed to abortion even if I were to lose my faith. I sat and watched in quiet awe as my two daughters stretched and slept in their mother's womb during the 20-week ultrasound scans. I don't need God or a holy book to tell me what is or isn't a 'person'."

While this is all well and good, a counter-narrative could easily be presented:

"I watched in quiet horror as the ultrasound flickered, showing the still-indistinct at 14-week mass focusing in and out on the screen. That mass of splitting and differentiating cells would tie me to my abuser forever. I would never, ever get away. This was it; this was the final leash. He had won. This was my life, forever. I had to get away. I had to abort."

Of course a father looking at the ultrasound image of his gestating, 20-week-old daughters is going to feel love and awe and the majesty of life, and deeply feel that those are his babies and that they are people. Because – and this is what Hasan is fundamentally missing in his entire piece – those babies were wanted.

Hasan says he wishes to make three points to "his friends on the pro-choice left". The first point he wants to make is that the UK is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to abortion access. He asserts that Jeremy Hunt's position, that 12 weeks' gestation should be the cut-off for legal abortion, is normal across western Europe, and that France, Germany, Italy and Belgium all adhere to this limit.

Well, I admit that as an American, I do not know the abortion rules for EU countries off the top of my head. But as a pedant, I do know that Google exists. And less than five minutes with Google told me this:

France: Abortion on demand is legal up to 12 weeks (14 weeks last menstrual period). After this, France reverts to something akin to what the UK has by default: two physicians must attest to the need for abortion due to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, the woman's life is in danger, or the foetus has deformities that are incompatible with life.

Germany: Much like France, in Germany abortion is legal and available largely on demand for the first trimester. After this point, the very broadly defined "medical necessity" may be invoked.

Belgium: As far as I can piece together from Anglophile websites and translated pages, Belgium allows abortion without stringent prohibitions until the 12th week, and – say it with me – in case of medical emergency or duress after that point.

Italy: While you might assume Italy would have the most restrictive laws, it allows abortion for the first 90 days of pregnancy, which is a bit closer to abortion until the 13th week. However, like everyone else, it merely takes a doctor's confirmation of severe injury to a woman's physical or mental health, or serious birth defects incompatible with life, in order to access an abortion after this cut-off point.

So, in other words, Hasan either does not understand the laws in the countries that he cites, or he is obfuscating in the hope that no one will notice.

Putting aside his factual inaccuracy, let's address what it would mean to restrict abortion to 12 weeks. In the UK, 91% of abortions procured were at or before 12 weeks; 78% are at or before 10 weeks. For the other 9%, the numbers do what you would expect, and continue to dramatically drop between the 14th and 16th week, and then again between the 16th and 19th week. Approximately 1% of abortions – around 2,729 – are done at or after the 20th week; numbers that happen to correspond pretty closely to how many abortions are granted due to there being abnormalities with the foetus that are largely considered incompatible with life.

As to why there is a delay in seeking abortion from that remaining 9%, the statistics do not give a reason. However, we can easily extrapolate that for about the majority of that group, the foetal abnormalities that led them to choose abortion were not detectable until closer to the 16th week of gestation (if not later), as that's approximately when testing results are accurate and available. For the remainder, we can draw upon a range of conclusions – access to services, delay due to outside forces, inability to decide and so forth – but the question ultimately remains as to whether or not any of that is relevant, when the option is either forced pregnancy and illegal abortion, or legal and safe abortion. Ultimately, whether you are a "lefty" (or otherwise a social progressive), you must agree to some basic concepts, including the preservation of the rights to life, liberty and the responsible exercise of moral agency.

These rights are undermined when women are denied the freedom to decide whether and when to have children, and how many of them to have. Reproductive freedom is an essential part of women's right to liberty. It is vital to both liberty and responsible moral agency that we be free to protect our health, to plan and shape our lives. So vital is this social good that wherever safe, legal and affordable abortion is unavailable, many women risk death, permanent physical injury, social disgrace and legal prosecution to end unwanted pregnancies.

I realise that Hasan attempts to block this argument by arguing that the "unborn child" is weaker and more vulnerable, and thus more deserving of protection, but this assumes that a foetus has full moral status equal to that of the woman who is pregnant. At this point, I merely refer you to Mary Anne Warren's chapter on Abortion and Human Rights in Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things, wherein she clearly explains the biological and moral justifications to not grant sentience, and therefore equal moral status, to first- and early second-trimester foetuses.

From this inaccurate argument, Hasan moves on to another one: the history of women's rights activists and an apparent argument that early feminists were anti-choice and … well, I'm not entirely sure what his argument is, other than to note this historical fact and then deviate into modern anti-choice feminism:

"Then there is the history you gloss over: some of the earliest advocates of women's rights, such Mary Wollstonecraft, were anti-abortion, as were pioneers of US feminism such as Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; the latter referred to abortion as "infanticide". In recent years, some feminists have recognised the sheer injustice of asking a woman to abort her child in order to participate fully in society; in the words of the New Zealand feminist author Daphne de Jong: "If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social status, they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience."

There are two separate issues here. First, history. Yes, Anthony and Stanton were anti-abortion. Historical women's rights activists were not always awesome. For example, Anthony and Stanton were also quite racist by contemporary standards. Anthony was so upset with the idea of freedmen getting the vote before women that she frequently argued that educated white women would make better voters than ignorant black and immigrant men. She also wasn't above using racist fears to further her goals; after the 15th Amendment to the US constitution gave freedmen the right to vote, she argued that voting freedmen threatened the safety of white women (playing up fears of "racial contamination").

Are we then to assume that Hasan thinks contemporary feminists should back the racist positions held by Anthony? One presumes not, as this would undoubtedly negatively effect him. Why, then, should we selectively be required to follow other outdated ideas? It's not glossing over history to be grateful for advocates who set the stage for our rights while simultaneously discarding the culturally constructed beliefs that we now view as morally wrong.

The second issue is contemporary anti-choice feminists like de Jong. Yes, many contemporary women are anti-choice, in part because they focus on the social avenues that influence women to abort: it is a problem that a woman feels the need to abort a wanted pregnancy to preserve lifestyle, career, economic or social status. This is "pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience". The solution to this, however, is not banning abortion and instituting forced pregnancy. The solution is to change the circumstances – the social determinants – that leave a woman deciding a wanted pregnancy should be terminated.

But note the emphasis there: wanted. While changing the social status quo may change the mind of some unintentionally pregnant women, removing choice also functions to reinforce male convenience and control. As Warren notes, abortion is controversial now because it is a "symbol of contemporary cultural and political struggles over sexual morality and the social roles of women". Those who are anti-choice typically tend to follow more conservative beliefs about the physiological differences between men and women, tend to oppose sex education in schools and resist easy access to contraceptives. And perhaps most to the point, this is done because abortion is seen as a threat to the role of women in the family "because it frees them to engage in heterosexual intercourse without the risk of unwanted motherhood". Or, as the feminist blog Jezebel frequently notes, this viewpoint considers unintended/unwanted pregnancy a punishment for women having "unsanctioned" sex; that is, sex for fun, outside marriage, and without the intent to procreate.

We can only extrapolate, from historical documents, what founding suffragettes may or may not have believed about contemporary access to abortion. We do know that abortion prior to Roe v Wade in the US was an often nasty and horrible process that threatened, and took, the lives of women; it is difficult to believe that the explicit danger to a woman from an abortion in the 1800s didn't influence the anti-abortion position of Anthony, Stanton and others. We don't need to go back to Stanton's time to know how dangerous abortion was, either – we don't even have to go back to the 1960s. All we have to do is look at countries today where abortion is illegal. In 2008, complications from unsafe abortion accounted for an estimated 13% of all maternal deaths worldwide.

Hasan would like his rights to his belief respected and perhaps understood, rather than being demonised as a misogynist or dismissed as a man who has no right to an opinion on this topic. What Hasan is missing is that no one is saying he has to be pro-choice. He can be anti-choice. But that is much different than attempting to make a choice for others.

Joe Biden, of all people, eloquently stated this Thursday night during the American vice-presidential debate, when he said:

"I've been a practising Catholic my whole life. With regard to abortion, I accept my church's position on abortion. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews. I do not believe that we have a right to tell women they can't control their body. It's a decision between them and their doctor."

Hasan argues, at the end of his article, that the biggest problem with the abortion debate is that it is asymmetrical, "the two sides are talking at cross-purposes". But the biggest problem with the abortion debate is not that it is asymmetric – it is that one group, the anti-choice group, is attempting to force their views on everyone else. As a pro-choice woman, I am not interested in whether or not another woman is carrying a pregnancy to term or aborting, save in the case where the woman asks for my opinion or involvement. My pro-choice position is not pushing her to abort – not even if, in my opinion, it would be the best thing for her life. As I do not believe in forced pregnancy, I do not believe in forced abortion.

I believe in choice.

• A version of this piece first appeared on the author's blog.