At worst they take women into activities we should be stopping for men – women’s boxing is a painful example here

At worst they take women into activities we should be stopping for men – women’s boxing is a painful example here. When we add up all the new “rights” being claimed for women through the new technologies of biology, fertility, child birth and reproduction, a cautious questioning seems more appropriate than the triumphalism evident almost everywhere.The aim of every act of intercourse may not and should not be the conception of a child. But the aim of every pregnancy by a mother who wants a child must be the production of a live healthy baby with the minimum pain and suffering to both. Despite a century of strenuous effort beginning with Mrs Pankhurst and her shock-troop suffragettes, women’s rights in Britain are still grossly defective in some important respects.

Of the four key demands articulated in the Sixties (equal opportunity, equal access to power, abortion and contraception on demand and equal pay) not one has yet been achieved.In their place women have gained certain freedoms which may look like rights but which fail to advance us. Whatever happened to a man’s right to die in peace?Of course it is right that women should have more empowerment and control. While protesting the undying love for her husband which has made her want his child, Blood had his doctors subject the dying man to electric shocks to his genitals to force an ejaculation to collect his sperm. But now the biological enfranchisement of women has reached such a pace that the cases are coming out of the clinics and law courts every week.Mandy Allwood, the Birmingham woman who found herself carrying octuplets last year, anticipated Miss S in her refusal to agree to medical treatment which would undoubtedly have cost their brothers’ and sisters’ lives No one thought her mad. Or perhaps with a lucrative pounds 1m newspaper contract in the offing, the world agreed that though this was madness, there was method in it.An even starker example of “a woman’s right” is to be found in the case of Diane Blood.

When she was told that her physical condition meant that she and the baby would probably die, she replied “So be it.” The forcible committal she then suffered under the Mental Health Act branded her as mad, and so unable to be responsible for her own health and that of the child. The order was granted on the grounds that Miss S’s behaviour had led doctors to fear for her mental state. Last April a pregnant 29-year-old woman known only as Miss S was compulsorily detained in hospital and forced to have her baby by Caesarean section after doctors won a court order in effect giving them control over her body against her will. The control of women over their own fertility and reproduction may be the last battle on the road to women’s freedom, but like the case of Miss S and her Caesarian delivery, it has by no means been won yet. But I have set up the Mitchemp Trust to help disadvantaged children go on a free adventure holiday. I remember, in my school days, there were people who couldn’t afford the pounds 20 to go away for a weekend on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.. If I’m successful, we’re flying our eldest daughter, who is seven, to the North Pole to meet me.Following in Father’s footsteps? No, I don’t like to push her towards exploring.

It was a nightmare getting it all in.A word from our sponsor? I was sponsored by a company which at the end of the year heard my presentation and then said: `Get your fees in – quick.’ Two days later, it went bankrupt but I still got the cash.Arctic ambition? I’d put our chances at 50-50. I got on the course not because of my academic qualifications but because the tutor liked the idea of a student being in the Himalayas. I came back with amoebic dysentery.A year of living dangerously? For the course, the forerunner of the university’s MBA, I did a marketing study of outdoor products I found it very tough – in libraries at 3am and so on. Geography and biology were my favourites.A-levels? Geography, biology and chemistry. I left school and finished them at Bath Tech.University? Business Studies at Manchester.Finals Results? I’m not telling I’m not proud of my degree I was never there; I was climbing around the world. But my best qualification is the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.O-levels? About eight, in two sittings; I suppose I was a late starter. It was the Duke of Edinburgh’s Bronze Award which got me started when I was 13.