No woman has the right to have a baby — and I should know

Surrounded by her grown- up daughter, Katherine, and her new husband Paul, Jacky edwards proudly holds her newborn baby Caspian in her arms, beaming with joy.

It’s just like any other happy family photograph. Yet, as Jacky explains, in reality it is all ‘a bit Jeremy Kyle’. For Katherine, 30, with two children of her own, is the surrogate for her mother’s child — her baby brother.

The sperm donor is her stepfather Paul, who Mum met on a dating website. Jacky already has five children by a husband who died. But she was desperate to have a child with new husband Paul and, unable to get IVF due to her age (she’s 47), her daughter stepped in. It is a ‘circle of love’, they say. While I understand the desire of any couple to cement their marriage with a baby, isn’t this taking familial love to the extreme?

How do you explain to a child that his biological mum is also his big sister? Yet Katherine doesn’t seem to mind — quite the opposite. She has kept a selfie record of her entire pregnancy and is planning to write a book about it.

Forget whether Caspian, when he’s older, will want people to know how he was conceived. His mother/sister has already chosen to broadcast it to the world. It’s hard enough being a

COMEDIAN Rob Brydon said at his friend Ronnie Corbett’s memorial service: ‘To walk down the street with Ronnie was to witness something rather wonderful — faces all around would light up with joy.’ How many of today’s foul-mouthed comics could do that? Even the sight of Ronnie’s famous chair in Westminster Abbey lifted our hearts.

kid born into a traditional family these days, let alone one like this.

Yes, most women want to be mothers, but that does not mean having a child is a right.

What really worries me about so many people today is that this sense of entitlement overrides all other considerations — with women using modern medicine in ways that fly in the face of nature to have babies simply to satisfy a longing.

I understand the yearning as well as anyone, because I never could have children — I simply had to accept the situation, painful as it is. Yet here we have a woman, aged 47, who already has five, using desperately unorthodox means to have a sixth.

Caspian, Katherine says, was conceived in order to ‘bring some happiness’ back to the family after the death of her father.

How tragic — and selfish — that no one seems to have considered the happiness of the little boy.