Sentient Beings?

Animals do not have rights. Rather, we degrade ourselves as human beings if we are cruel to them.

I am no vegan. I never cared for the hunting ban with which Tony Blair and Hilary Armstrong bought support for the Iraq War, although now that it is the law, then it ought at least to be enforced as such, and the Conservatives' loss of their overall majority showed how much of a vote-winner the prospect of its repeal would be. And no, animals do not feel human emotions, which is why, among other things, they ought not to be given awards for bravery.

But animals do feel pain. Of course they do. That the Government thinks that they do not, or is at least prepared to pretend to think that, is not a surprise. By accepting an amendment to the Queen's Speech, it did not even bother to hold a parliamentary vote in order to provide funding in England and Wales for abortions for women from Northern Ireland.

The last time that there was a Commons vote on abortion, a generation ago, the Thatcher Government legalised it up to birth, dutifully opposed by John Smith and Charles Kennedy, by Ronnie Campbell and George Galloway. So it is for abortions up to and including partial birth that this new provision will be paying.

Apparently, though, the fetus is both "a part of the woman's body" and "insentient". Is it the whole of a woman's body that is insentient? Or is it only the parts that are directly concerned with reproduction?