I’m proud of my son Danny Kruger, but I don’t agree with him on abortion

Most of the time I have an easy time of it on social media, with tweeters being nice about my colourful attire, liking my cooking hacks or flowers. But this week I had a dose of toxic hate. My son, the MP Danny Kruger, was unwise enough to join a debate in the Commons, saying he didn’t think women should have complete ‘bodily autonomy’ in the case of abortion as there’s another body – the baby’s – involved.

I don’t agree with him, any more than I agree with his stance on assisted dying. He’s anti, I’m in favour. But that’s fine. I still love and admire him. There’s more to him that the Twitter storm allows: he’s spent his whole career worrying about disadvantaged communities: as a student he led a convoy of vans full of blankets and medicines to Croatia, he spent ten years running a prison charity, as a policy wonk he’s always been mainly concerned with what is now called ‘levelling up', and now works for Michael Gove. Yet I’m accused of spawning a monster. Also of failing to reel him in (he’s nearly 50!), of being an uncaring, self-serving Tory bitch (I’ve voted Conservative once in 60 odd years), of sending him to Eton (guilty as charged).

It’s really upsetting. My Twitter account is awash with this poison, but his must be much worse. No wonder so many MPs quit.I’ve been trying to decide where I stand on the abortion issue and it’s not simple. Yes, I think women should decide if they want to have a baby or not. The morning-after pill negates the difficult business of getting the guy to wear a condom or continually swallowing daily birth control pills. It aborts the incipient foetus before it has really got going. And best of all it’s available on the internet: no disapproving doctors; no need to tell your mother – or the baby’s father. So why does the casual acceptance that a womb is like a garden where weeds are routinely yanked out make me feel so uneasy?

You don’t have to be a Christian to think there is something wrong with a society where women expect to have an abortion every few years. In a casual discussion in a BBC make-up room of five women, four of us had had abortions (not counting morning-after prevention): one young woman had had four. Only one hadn’t had any. She was an evangelical Christian and hadn’t had sex. Not believing in God, I don’t like the conclusion this mini-poll suggests. We should not need religion to solve this problem.

But I don’t like the idea of women being denied an abortion either. How can anyone force a girl, maybe not much more than a child herself, to have a child which she doesn’t want and cannot care for? Even if she decides to keep the baby, unless she’s well-supported and is pretty resourceful, the chances are that early motherhood will condemn her to no further education, no job and a life on benefits, with her chances of a happy, carefree youth out the window.

I think the not-altogether satisfactory answer is pretty much what we have now. The morning-after pill is here to stay, we couldn’t stop if we wanted to. Plus our current law (legal termination up to 24 weeks with sign-off from two doctors), later termination only in medical emergency when the mother’s life is in danger.) Not perfect but it prevents the horror and trauma of late terminations unless absolutely vital.

Of course, it's a good thing that there is no longer any stigma about unmarried motherhood. It’s just a pity that in removing the shame and guilt, we seem to have also removed the need for responsibility. We need women who don’t want babies not to get pregnant in the first place. Abortions are traumatic, expensive and often do long lasting psychological damage to the mother. I know several women who think every day about the life they ended years ago, when it wasn’t convenient to have a baby just then.

And then, there’s the knotty question of adoption. There is a chronic shortage of babies for adoption. Most prospective parents want a baby rather than a child who has spent years in care or is the product of an unhappy or abusive home. Hopeful parents can wait five years for a baby, two years for a toddler. Some of that is bureaucracy, some of it a misguided desire to find exactly the right ethnic and cultural match which makes it near impossible for a couple where, say, the woman is Korean and the father Australian, or the mother an atheist and father a Rasta, however well they tick all the other boxes: happy home, no criminal record; no history of divorce; no smoking; clean house; working from home; spare room for the child. etc.

Would it not be good if a way could be found to stop terminating unwanted children, but to instead encourage pregnant girls to consider, along with abortion, the option of bearing the child? She would need to be funded of course, and there might be cries of 'baby farming'. But she would be doing an enormous service for some childless couple, would know her child was getting a good chance with a vetted family, and would not have the anxiety, guilt and possibly regret of abortion. And at any time during her pregnancy, she could change her mind and keep the bub.

Of course, most modern women would rather abort than face nine months of pregnancy, and most will deal with the problem with a pill. But for the longer-term pregnancies, is abortion really the answer? Maybe if the adoption service could be radically overhauled, properly funded and run with the interests of the children, born and unborn, at heart, we could at least begin to solve two problems at once.