Waiting for motherhood

“[…] the idea that young women are tossing back ecstasy pills and laughing in the face of fading fertility is ridiculous. A woman would have to be a blind and deaf hermit to be unaware of the facts about fertility or to assume that IVF is easy, cheap or guaranteed. As a woman in prime child-bearing age but with no plans to bear children in the immediate future, I have a message for all those Cassandra commentators who claim they're giving us a wake-up call. Let me assure them, we don't need it - many of us have long been awake, having a very dark night of the soul.

To delay consciously having children is often depicted as naked selfishness: you are too busy going off on minibreaks with a merry-go-round of boyfriends, finding your chakhras in yoga classes and engaging in other forms of what is sneeringly referred to as "me time" to do what is your biological imperative.

But surely having a baby - for which you're prepared neither emotionally or financially and which you don't have the time to raise properly because you are in the early days of your career and don't have the clout to bargain for time off - simply out of fear that you might not be able to have one later could equally be defined as selfish.

I know a lot of people who married in their mid-20s and, while some of them are still happily together, an astonishing number were divorced before they reached 30. Maybe modern society is working against biology on this one but personally - and I say that word with emphasis - I would rather have one child when I'm 39 in a stable relationship than four by the age of 33 without a father present, for the sake of both the offspring and, yes, selfish little ol' me.” Hadley Freeman, “Why I’m happy to wait.”