I am no prude, nor am I Victorian. I had always thought my views on morality were moderate - more conservative than some, but not extreme. I have always been sensibly pro-life - and pro-life in its broadest sense. I believe in a culture of life and human dignity.
For those reasons, I read this report, headlined Rise in teen abortions prompts calls for reform of sex education, in The Times on 20 June, with immense and almost indescribable sadness. Half of pregnancies among girls under 18, The Times reports, end in abortions. Children as young as five may be given sex education. Possibly even more disturbing, according to an article on the same page headlined 'The ones I worry about are those who have the baby', is the fact that girls as young as 12 are getting pregnant - and having abortions. John Parsons, a Lambeth gynaecologist, says he has lost track of the number of abortions he has carried out among 12 year-olds. In the space of one day, he carried out nine terminations - "normal", he says.
And then, it gets worse, with Caitlin Moran's piece headlined These girls deserve our gratitude for avoiding the worse option. She is almost correct when she writes:
Let's face it, the rise in teenage abortion is not the scandalous statistic here. It is, ultimately, the teenage pregnancies that are the problem. Why are these pregnancies occurring?
Her question is the right one, and so is her view that the primary issue is the teenage pregnancies. However, the fact that it results in so many abortions - destroying the lives of both mother and child - is also, contrary to what Moran says, "scandalous".
Moran is right, too, when she says: "Almost exactly half the cause of teenage pregnancies - teenage boys - rarely, if ever, get mentioned". We should not scandalise teenage girls who get pregnant, and ignore the biological fact that a boy must have been involved somehow.
Reading Moran's piece, I was with her up to a point. But then she lost me completely, in her final paragraph. I reflected on what is so wrong with our society today - a society which has lost its culture of life, its believe in human dignity, its value of the sanctity of every human life - epitopomised in her chilling words praising pregnant teenage girls who have abortions:
They, very kindly - and potentially at great cost to themselves - make what could be a problem for us all, simply vanish
To describe human life in such a way has echoes of the Nazis. It is a sad time we are living in.