Join the Alpha Mummy blog discussion: Do you really want that baby?

What is it with women and babies? Why do we feel that to be successful, to be valued, to be simply what we are — feminine — we need to reproduce like Victorians?

I’m not talking about the likes of Nadya Suleman, aka Octomom, the American woman who, with her 14 fatherless children, could be considered badly misguided. Or about rural South Americans, whose instruction on contraception comes from the Pope. I’m talking about the educated, professional middle classes – yoohoo, readers! – who hit a certain age, ignore the rich and varied lives they already have, and decide that what they really need to be doing is having babies, like, now.

We’ve been to school, we watch the news, we heard David Attenborough loud and clear when, last month, he called the world’s ongoing population explosion “frightening”. We’re told that global numbers are increasing by 80 million a year (that’s an entire new Germany), and our resources dwindling. And yet we want babies. Loads of lovely, chubbly babies who smell of sugar and powder. And if we don’t want babies there must be something wrong with us. We must be Susan Boyle, living a life of unkissed spinsterhood. Or we must be barren, geriatric and broken-hearted; the five rounds of IVF must have failed.

How many long-term couples do you know who have chosen not to have children? I know one. And she, the female half, successful, sexy, and happy as she is, is constantly having to deal with nonplussed reactions, or, worse — “Oh, I’m so sorry” — when asked if she has children.

The rest of us get pregnant. Because having babies is just what you do, isn’t it? You go to university, you get drunk, you find a boyfriend, you graduate, you get a job, you split up with your boyfriend, you run around the place, you get promoted, your ambition stirs, you meet someone and discover you love him, you buy a car, you move in together, you get a mortgage, you get engaged, you have a party, you go after a better job, you get married, you survive Christmas with the in-laws, you have a baby. It’s just what you do.

It shouldn’t be. Ask a neurosurgeon why he or she went through 12 years of medical school, and the answer is unlikely to be “It felt right” or “It was the next obvious step”. Being a parent is as much — more — of a vocation as a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher, yet we enter parenthood on a flimsy combination of romance, conformity and competitiveness. None of these is a good enough reason.

I have a friend (a much-lauded barrister) whose driving motive for having her first baby was that, at 36, she was “not getting any younger”. Not a good enough reason. She is now trying for her third because she “wants a boy”. Not a good enough reason. She once didn’t see her two daughters awake for a fortnight because of her work hours. But, of course, had she chosen not to have children she would have been to the world at large an oddity, pitiable and slightly unnatural.

Two years ago another friend panic-married a man she hardly knew. She left her home, work, family and friends in California, where she had been brilliantly happy, to move to London with this new, nice fella, to have wedlocked babies. A baby duly came, spent the first six months of its life howling, and his mother spent that time in bewildered misery, looking at this small, sweet, screaming thing that she had never wanted. “You must have wanted him,” I say, “to have left everything behind in California.” She shrugs and screws her forehead up. “The time had come. I just had to bite the bullet and do it.” Why? Why on earth?

When I became pregnant with my first child I had assumed that everyone else at the midwife’s office who had planned their pregnancy had done so with the same fervent thought and determined desire. I swiftly discovered that I was wrong. Many, many women, though 150 years out of the crinoline, still seem to be conditioned and oppressed into having children, to an extent that they do so without giving it any real thought.

Having a child, in 2009, should no longer be the “done thing”. It should no longer be what is expected of us. The choice for women should no longer be between blow-dried normality (children) or nest-haired spinsterhood (not). It should be a genuine choice, made freely, and with the certainty, passion and forethought that we would grant any other seismic and deliberate life decision — that we would grant 12 years at medical school.

Because, in 2009, if you want a baby you had better want one badly. Badly enough to be introducing him or her to a world groaning at the seams, with drying resources, melting icecaps and bombs strapped to various parts of some of its inhabitants. And don’t forget that in Britain, according to the friendly society Liverpool Victoria, the average cost of raising a child to the age of 21 is £193,000.

The only conceivable reason for having a child would be that parenting that child is your vocation. The Optimum Population Trust, with Sir David Attenborough as patron, is campaigning that we have no more than two children. It may be too easy for me to this say now, but we need to start thinking harder about whether we have children at all.

Slaughterhouse Heart, by Afsaneh Knight (Black Swan), is available in paperback, £7.99

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