LET ME BE clear and start by saying: I do not want to have another child. I have been a parent for 16 years now, so I have a fair bit of experience under my belt.

I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been pregnant twice, which is a perfectly reasonable number of times to try something before deciding it isn’t for you.

Childbirth can also get in the sea. If you ask me, there is nothing natural or magical about it.

We have two wonderful, amazing, brilliant and lovely kids. Our family has been blessed beyond measure, and is also, very firmly, complete. That is, right up until my biological clock turned into a Chornobyl-style warning alarm in my late 30s, loudly announcing that the window was closing. That it would never reopen. That the decision had to be made, or it would be made for us.

I had both of my daughters in quick succession. I didn’t exactly plan to have my first, but once she arrived, I didn’t want her to be an only child. I was in my early 20s and, being a child of the last century and a society with massive families, was programmed to believe that all only children were a bit strange. A little off. You know what I mean, of course you do.

Now, with the benefit of 16 more years of life experience under my belt, I do realise that that notion was just silly. And possibly one started by the Catholic Church, come to think of it…

The reality, of course, is that only children are not guaranteed to become........

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