SPARKS flew when hot topics like women's rights and abortion were discussed on an episode of The Big Questions filmed in Swindon.

The BBC talk show hosted by Nicky Campbell tackles tricky moral, ethical or religious debates. Yesterday saw experts sparring in front of an audience at The Deanery.

One of the guests was Helen Pankhurst, the great granddaughter of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst. She said: "We need power itself, we need the political system to be much more feminist."

Lawyer and political activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, who has appeared breakfast shows This Morning and Good Morning Britain to discuss racism, said: "We are fighting the good fight for equality and justice. I'm sorry, it's not about a fight that is excluding men. Men need to get over themselves. Join us, or stay the heck out of our way."

The touch paper was lit when a professor of the law school at Reading University, Rosa Freedman, spoke on reproductive rights.

She said: "There should be no abortion limit and it should be up to the individual provider because there are instances where a woman's life is at risk, so how do you balance the two rights? The woman is a living person, the foetus until it is born is not a viable human."

Christian poet Sarah De Nordwall disagreed. "A child in the womb is a separate individual. The women's movement and women's rights can only move alongside men's rights and the right to life, we have to move forward as families and as a community," she said.

"We have to think about men's rights, a lot of the issues around mental health is when the family collapses because men are pushed out of their role as fathers."

Dr Mos-Shogbamimu said: "I'm totally pro-choice, as far as I'm concerned it's the woman's choice.

"Let's learn from the research and from experiences of women, learn from the medical practitioners. Let's make it available and to have no stigma around it, but bottom line is let the women make that choice."

Earlier in the show guests discussed the issue of homelessness. One described how she had suffered it for five years in the 1990s. Being without a home had damaged her mental health and she felt she would never be on the property ladder.

She had managed to come in off the streets with the help of a stranger who had offered her a room in his house because he didn't see why she should be without a roof over her head. They had since struck up a friendship.

Borough councillor Bazil Solomon was in the audience. He said: "There's an emergency number for emergency housing if someone is going to go homeless.We do need more social housing. It's a moral point and we do need political will."

As the show came to an end and host Nicky tried to sign off, the furious debate about women's rights carried on behind him.