By framing TB and HIV screening within a battery of other healthy living tests, including pregnancy, diabetes and hypertension, people are encouraged to get tested for the diseases.
There are only a handful of exemptions to the ban on abortion – to save the mother's life, if the pregnancy was a result of rape, or, in a recent controversial addition, if the foetus has anencephaly, a rare birth defect in which the brain and skull do not develop.
The girl at the heart of this story had been raped in Dublin and sought to terminate her pregnancy in England.
Or was it DI Lindsay Denton – a woman who, we know, has a temper, whose relationship with Dryden came to a bitter end and who recently terminated a pregnancy, presumably on his orders?
The momentum for change on abortion laws has intensified since the Indian dentist Savita Halappanavar died from blood poisoning after a Galway hospital refused to terminate her pregnancy last autumn.
Genital herpes is particularly common in people aged 20-24, and while it's easily treated, they are few symptoms and, if undetected, it can cause problems during pregnancy.
Neither is the pill 100% effective at preventing pregnancy.
It is important to be assessed as being fit for a home birth – any medical conditions such as bleeding disorders, heart disease, diabetes, epilepsy as well as any previous complications in a pregnancy such as a caesarean section, high blood pressure or haemorrhage may result in being recommended to opt for a planned birth at an obstetric unit.
And in July of this year, the Fawcett Society released their own research showing not only that women suffer a pay penalty because of pregnancy, but that in the current economic downturn more and more pregnant women are either losing their jobs or facing some other kind of pregnancy-related discrimination.
The one point on which I'm inclined to agree with the noble lord, and on which evidence abounds in spades, is the fact that even now, 35 years after the Sex Discrimination Act came into force, the laws protecting women against pregnancy discrimination at work are being flouted, and seemingly indiscriminately.
It is claimed that every two days a Brazilian woman dies while trying to end a pregnancy, and there are 200,000 hospital admissions a year as a result of bungled procedures.
