Our women's minister is using 'feminism' to justify her attack on a woman's right to choose. That can't be right

What does it mean to be a "feminist", let alone a "modern" one? This long-standing debate received an unlikely answer from Maria Miller, the new women and equalities minister, who believes her status as a very modern feminist is proven by her support for a reduction in the abortion limit from 24 to 20 weeks.

I know, I don't really understand it either but given her current position of authority we should at least try to understand what she means.

In an astonishing interview with the anti-abortion Daily Telegraph, she repeats her support for reducing the time limit made in a 2008 vote and explains her brand of "modern feminism" thus: "You have got to look at these matters in a very common sense way. I looked at it from the really important stance of the impact on women and children."

She is "riven by that very practical impact that late-term abortion has on women".

So Miller was acting out of a sense that as a mother of three with better than average income and intelligence, she has greater ability, or sense, to gauge the impact of having a baby on the woman whose womb he or she inhabits. Call me an old-fashioned feminist but isn't that the real point of accepting the limit for what it is; a date that simply allows women time to make up their own minds about something deeply personal.

Your support or otherwise for abortion limits should simply be a matter of personal choice. Friends, colleagues and acquaintances can all agree to differ on term limits, just please don't become "minister for women" and act immediately to control the bodies of over half the population.

The irony seemingly lost on those who would reduce the limit is that few women choose to wait until they can already feel a child moving inside them to decide on a termination. The vast majority of abortions – there were 189,931 in England and Wales in 2011 – happen before 14 weeks' gestation: only 2% happen after 20 weeks, and who knows what individual pain, hardship and horror lies behind each one of those decisions. The point is, we don't.

Like most of those who have expressed doubts about the current 24-week limit, most forcefully health secretary Jeremy Hunt but also David Cameron, it is "modern science" that is used to justify Miller's stance. Babies born before 24 weeks in 1967 when the abortion bill passed tended not to live.

But this is not science that is recognised by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which two years ago found no scientific evidence to justify a lower limit. I don't know how many of them are feminists but I bet they are responsible for bringing more children into the world than any MP. Which possibly explains why an amendment aimed at stripping the Royal College of its role setting clinical guidelines on abortions was introduced as part of Nadine Dorries amendment plans. Fortunately, like the one designed to stop women being advised on their options, it failed.

Supporters of reducing the limit, such as Christina Odone, former editor of the Catholic Herald, suggest in (guess where?) the Telegraph that it is the "pro abortion furies" who are anti-science and anti-feminist, refusing to change the view that a woman's right to choose is sacred.

By all means let's have a debate about abortion and science and women's rights but please, please don't muddy the water of what feminism means by positing the idea that those who know best (at least according to their own opinion and belief) speak for each and everyone of us.

Even writing that choice has to be at the heart of this debate gives me such a sense of déjà vu that I'm immediately placed in one of those old films where the final scene reveals we have been living in flashback all along. Are we doomed to endlessly repeat the same horror until 2015? The big fear, and part of the reason why Miller's interview prompted a twitter storm #mariamillerdoesnotspeakforme, is that Miller and Hunt could together add governmental ballast to MPs such as Nadine Dorries who have so far acted on the fringes of a party that, quite rightly, sees this issue as non-partisan.

Let's not allow that to happen.