Rosemary McLeod: Nobody's body but mine

I can't think of another situation where strangers think they have the right to dictate what you do with your body. Photo/Getty

It was Jane Doe's fate to be the fragile basis on which American women won abortion rights back in 1973. When she died this week her attitude to that had gone full circle, delightful ammunition for opponents of women's rights, though no great surprise in itself. She was human, after all, which is to say full of contradictions.

Her real name was Norma McCorvey, a solo mother of two children when she got pregnant a third time.

She said she had been raped, which would have made the process of getting an abortion easier, but was a bad liar, wavered in her account, and was caught out.

Finally, while her case, now famous as Roe v Wade, progressed to the American Supreme Court for a final decision based in part on her right to privacy, she carried the child to term and gave birth to it.

There is a deadline on pregnancy, and it's tempting to say that a legal system historically contrived by males for the benefit of males quite naturally would not take that into account. Or maybe that's just obvious.

In 1995 McCorvey came out as an abortion opponent. By then she'd become a cause in herself, a symbol to many without either asking or wanting to be. She'd probably had enough of history and her part in it.

What makes her story compelling still is the drive by a new American government - of old white men - to take abortion underground again by revisiting her case.

They could succeed, but they won't stop women wanting abortions, or getting them. More will die, that's all, as they did before 1973, and still do wherever abortion is illegal.

It is the unacceptable paradox of a hard line on abortion that mothers die when the law gives the rights of their unborn children precedence over their own.

They become mere vessels, like the women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, bearers rather than beings, told what to do as if they are the state's children.

The right to abortion is already grudgingly observed in parts of America where women are forced to listen to a foetal heartbeat before the procedure, or made to read types of literature which spell out the reasons why opponents believe they shouldn't go ahead with it.

I can't think of another situation where strangers think they have the right to dictate what you do with your body, though paternalistic doctors used to get away with it. Our mothers had it tough.

It used to anger me, back when this was a live issue here, that so much intrusive attention was paid to women seeking abortions while the fathers of the unwanted children, who had equally chosen not to use contraception, were invisible, avoiding both responsibility and criticism.

A pregnancy is there for anyone to see, but an absconding father is free to carry on with his life as if nothing happened.

If pregnancies are ever to become compulsory again, the least we can do is chemically castrate these losers for the duration of the pregnancy, and make them swallow libido-suppressing drugs under medical supervision, accompanied by pills that cause severe bloating, and others that cause regular vomiting. That might give them a hint of the overwhelming reality of experiencing pregnancy.

Better still, they should have to go before a panel of women to argue why and when the treatment should be reversed.

Might all this endanger their health? Pregnancy endangers the lives of mothers and babies, but nobody thinks twice about that.

Here let me say I would be happy to accept a fulltime, well-paid job writing laws and regulations. I feel I have a gift for it.

Equally alarming is new research suggesting that soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be easily treated in future by having specific bad memories erased from their brains.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have discovered that individual memories are encoded in just a few cells in the brain.

They have succeeded in destroying bad memories surgically in mice, they say, though how can they possibly know? and hope there will be drugs to do this to humans in future.

So now they have designs on everyone's brains if they've had bad experiences, as who hasn't?

I wasn't going to go that far in my recommendations (see above) but am reminded of the joy lobotomies have brought to the many people shuffling about the world who would thank their surgeons adoringly if they hadn't been robbed of their identities at the stroke of a scalpel, for their own good you understand.