A wanted pregnancy as much as a dreaded pregnancy can play differently than all one's previous imaginings.

Bodies are becoming our personal mission to tame, extend and perfect.

The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.

I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.

I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.

There are so many young women who tip over into being a facsimile: they don't really inhabit their lives or their bodies.