Smash hit

These envious women, thinks Sloan, are being tripped up by baseless ideals of family life. “It’s the same ideal that makes it so hard to be a single mother. Women are looking for the perfect spouse and father. They’re clinging to this idea, disregarding families and marriages in the real world. It’s the same for some of the critics of single motherhood. They are not looking at the reality of what happens between Mom and Dad. The taboo is you’re a loser because you didn’t get a man.”

She points out the reality for many married women. “They’re pretty much doing everything themselves. You have this psychological safety net being in a couple, even though your partner may not be doing very much.”

More than anything else, Sloan is accused of being selfish. Why not adopt? “I always wanted the experience of pregnancy. It’s a selfish choice to have your own biological child whether you are single or married. I’d like to turn that question around and ask them are they really concerned with the children? Unlike so many married couples, single mothers by choice meticulously plan their pregnancies and how they’ re going to raise and afford the children . . . A lot of couples who don’t want children have children, either to keep the marriage together or because the child wasn’t planned.”

She points to the high divorce rate in the West and the “accidental” pregnancy epidemic that afflicts so many thirtysomething middle-class women. Is the woman who carefully plans her pregnancy really morally inferior to the woman who conceives by the man she met at a party three weeks ago? Or the woman who stays in a bad relationship because she desperately wants children?

Whatever the public think about people like Sloan, there’s no law that says she or anybody else can’t go it alone. Increasing numbers of women have decided to be single parents. Terms such as “DIY donors” and “shopping for sperm” are becoming commonplace.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, has given warning about “new rules of normality” that he fears will sweep across Britain if the Government pushes through new legislation to make it easier for gay women to conceive via IVF. No doubt he’d feel the same about Louise Sloan, who conceived in an arrangement which has no roots in the heterosexual two-parent paradigm.

I feel an Oliver James book coming on. If, as Larkin said, your mum and dad f*** you up, will the nonexistent dad f*** you up a little more, or a little less?

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