I love history, a lot. I think the knowledge thereof is important, including seemingly little or insignificant kinks in what might otherwise be a long, overarching journey through time. It is by plotting those little kinks that we get to appreciate the colour and nuance of each era within that story, and develop a much better understanding of what we may be dealing with in the present, and how we navigate same in the future.

In the light of the long-expected and predictable decision of the US Supreme Court to remove a woman’s right to make personal and medical decisions about her own body, by overturning the 1973 decision of the same court to install that same right in a case called Roe v Wade, I had intended to write about the history before and since that decision. Each of them matters.

That decision gave women in the US the right to abort a pregnancy as an integral part of the right to privacy. The court has now decided that is no longer the case, setting off a frenzy of protests and commentary in that country. Roe v Wade was the culmination of a long history of litigation, with the Griswold v Connecticut decision probably being the most significant jurisprudential precedent before the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. In that case, the court decided that contraception was part and parcel of a woman’s right to privacy...