I had a baby at 45 and my advice to you is: Don’t wait!

IHAD a baby when I was 45 and, by the laws of nature, there should probably have been a national inquiry. I was very grateful when it all worked out. So do I think it’s right for women to be attempting to have babies when they should be having HRT patches instead? Not if they can help it. In fact, the news last week from the Office for National Statistics that the only increase in birth rates is among women over 40 fills me with dread.

My daughter is the greatest gift I could have wished for, but the liberal belief that it is OK for women to delay having children until they are middle aged is misguided. As is the fantasy that pregnancy will continue to happen ‘ naturally’ when your eggs are past their sell-by date. Nothing about me getting pregnant was ‘natural’. I threw money at it and sheer determination. I flew to New York and saw an IVF specialist who could have got a Ford Cortina pregnant.

I had every test known to science, including PGD – Pre-Genetic Diagnosis – which can reveal a whole raft of genetic problems before the embryo is placed back in.

As my first child had been born seven years earlier with profound disabilities, I knew the increased risks of having a baby with a congenital abnormality when you are over 40 and I wasn’t prepared to take that chance. I’ve never hidden the fact that I needed so much help, yet I have lost count of the number of women who had their babies at the same age as me but who insist it ‘just happened’ for them.

They mirror an endless parade of celebrities who also claim to have not seen the inside of a fertility clinic – despite the fact the chances of falling pregnant unaided over 42 are around two per cent . These vain pretences are damaging because they give younger women false hope, encouraging them to ignore sound medical advice from the Royal College of Obstetricians that says the best time to have a baby is before you are 35.

It’s not just the conception that’s a struggle. Having a child in middle age is hard work. They take the kind of energy that I wasted in my 20s going out to parties, thinking I too could have it all.

Those of my friends who had their children then are the people I envy the most. They’ll be grandparents soon, which is not likely to happen if you delay having children until you are almost the age of a grandmother yourself.

So why have a whole generation of 40-somethings blithely ignored the loud bells of the ticking clock and are now rushing to have an 11th hour baby? And why are their younger sisters repeating the same mistakes? For the first in time in a decade, pregnancy rates among women in their late 20s and early 30s have fallen and show no sign of picking up.

There is the excuse that they are working on their careers or trying to get themselves on to the property ladder. But actually what I think it really comes down to is that they are just too picky. No man has been quite good enough.

I have known girlfriends who have had perfectly nice, reliable, hard-working boyfriends who have loved them but who they eventually dumped as they didn’t want them to be the father of their children.

ONE of them dumped her fiance because he didn’t share her love of poetry, and she is now in such a panic that she is trying to have a sperm donor baby. There is also an arrogance that comes with the naive belief it is possible to buck nature –researchers at Yale University revealed last year that over 90 per cent of women who had frozen their eggs did so because they were buying time until they found the right man. But who is the right man? And isn’t it just possible he could just be the nice guy in accounts?

Having a baby with someone is about commitment to child-rearing, and even the most gilded God will look ropey after a year with no sleep.

No woman who wants to be a mother should settle for second best. But even though it is Easter, I would say stop believing in miracles. They don’t happen that often.