You may know that I spent some time in the US last year for the presidential elections, and one of the things that I hated most was watching day-in day-out protesters outside the Planned Parenthood clinic across the road from the campaign office, harrassing women and families as they went in to access reproductive medical services.

And it’s scary, watching as the “moral” and “ethical” issues become more important in this election. In the US, none of us could believe that Americans could be taken in by George W. Bush’s concentration on gay marriage and abortion when they’re haemorraging jobs and when people can’t afford healthcare. But they were.

Could it happen here? I hope not. I’m not religious, but I welcome the commitment and contribution of people of faith and the churches to the campaigns against global poverty and AIDS.

But for the leader of the Catholic Church to start telling Catholics how to vote based on abortion is outrageous. I make no bones about it - I’m pro-choice, and far from being in favour of restricting women’s rights to safe legal abortions, I’m in favour of extending them. I believe that abortions should be available as early as possible, and as late as necessary - that means getting rid of archaic rules about consulting two doctors, and performing a delicate dance to say the right thing so as to get the referral. Let’s actually have abortion on demand - horrible term, all it means is to make abortion like any other procedure - up to a woman and her doctor and no-one else.

But then the pro-lifers aren’t going to vote for me anyway, are they? They don’t seem very keen on women MPs at all… “God made man and woman compatible, not equal. He gave us separate roles. The main role of women, whether we like it or not, is to raise children - not kill them by abortion for the sake of our personal freedom.”