The government of the ironies dances on. This week the story was the assault on the 24-week abortion limit. Its advocate is the minister for women, Maria Miller, who is, she says, "a very modern feminist" – a phrase I can barely type without laughing. Her voting record includes seeking to deny fertility treatment to lesbians; but such views are no bar to promotion in this administration, even to the equality throne. She told the Telegraph that she supported a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, which I suppose is better than the madness of Jeremy Hunt at health. He sits at his desk and fondly yearns for 12.

Miller said: "You have got to look at these matters in a very commonsense way. I looked at it from the really important stance of the impact on women and children. What we are trying to do here is not to put obstacles in people's way but to reflect the way medical science has moved on." Let us ignore the irony of a Conservative minister claiming to care about children, let alone children born in poverty, and the sort of women who often need late-term abortions – this government is no friend to the mentally ill or the suddenly destitute – and swiftly debunk the science.

There is no evidence that late-term abortion traumatises women who have unplanned pregnancies. It traumatises Miller, but that is another thing; Miller the woman can think as she pleases, but Miller the minister has a duty of evidence before she stirs the zeitgeist with a stick. One per cent of foetuses born at 22 weeks survive, it is true, but this is mere sentimentality towards strangers, a kind of moral grandiosity that carries no burden for the moraliser dreaming of fat, luscious babies in cartoonish tableaux. A ban at 20 weeks, however, would traumatise. It is precisely the 20-week scan that shows many disabilities – how much time will their mothers have to think if Miller has her way?

It is unclear what Miller actually proposes should happen to women who are unaware of a pregnancy until 20 weeks, or are in denial. I cannot tell you because Miller's team of civil servants refused to explain her views when I telephoned – being busy, or at lunch, or on the run. Perhaps she is too traumatised to clarify, to talk about coat hangers and gin baths and how the affluent will always find abortions, and the financially constrained won't? This is not common sense, or anything publishable. It is chaos.

I suspect that Miller is pro-life. I suspect that abortion repels this healthy, wealthy, influential woman, and she does not understand why any woman would want an abortion, because she has never needed one. Empathy, as ever, is an abstract to this government, a barrier to its ideological commitment to dismantling the state, and demonising those who need it. Women who are suddenly impoverished or vulnerable or very young – they are beyond her understanding, and her brief.

I suspect that Miller lacks the courage to be publicly pro-life, because she knows that forcing women to have babies they do not want is no less than a kind of life-threatening slavery, and it will not play well with the electorate, who are kinder than their government. It is better, surely, to pick at the edges, to pose as a moderate, a very modern feminist, and make abortion more painful, more scarring and more shameful? It's a thumbs-up for public morality, and public morality is cheap.

This is a fragment of a growing assault on birth control. The abortion wars in America, funded by Republicans who want miracle babies but not a functioning welfare state, grow more violent. In these waters, the morning-after pill is an "abortion pill"; women seeking abortions should be forced to look at ultrasound scans and describe the foetus; women seeking abortions should be forced to have internal examinations; women who are raped don't get pregnant; women who use contraceptives are "whores"; abortion providers are "terrorists", and so on, and on.

This is leaking into Europe. This summer the 40 Days For Life group stood in Bedford Square, London, watching women enter an abortion clinic, and approached them with counsel and literature. I saw them standing with placards seeking, it seemed to me, a moral validation from the crises of women they could not know. In Brighton a group called Abort67 stood at an abortion clinic holding pictures of dismembered foetuses; an activist was prosecuted for public order offences, but cleared – on this, Miller had nothing to say. In Ireland an advertising campaign showed pictures of foetuses split in half. They were hung at airports, or on trains, so women coming to London for abortions, usually alone I suspect, would see them and feel – what? Baby killer. What else? Fewer than 2% of abortions are after 24 weeks. Who cares?

If Miller were honest, she would say that the damaging impact abortion has on women largely comes from the views of people like herself. Gay people know this duplicitous narrative well, spouted from the mouths of hypocrites; bigots would tolerate them, were they less unhappy.