Why women are putting their eggs in the wrong basket . . .

Cleaning out a cupboard the other day, i came across a dusty little notebook, long forgotten. it was a diary i’d started back in 2003, a few days after my daughter was born, an attempt to put down on paper the powerful emotions i was feeling.

Flicking through the pages, i felt a mixture of embarrassment and sadness: my prose was woefully inadequate, riddled with cliches. i’d like to plead sleeplessness, but i think i was just overwhelmed. There are some things in life for which there are simply no words.

and the sadness? Well, those days are gone. She’s all grown up now, as is her younger brother.

and while they continue to be the centre of my world, i know i will never again feel the overpowering emotion i felt when they were small. it’s a unique, very special feeling.

That is why i have so much sympathy for women who want children but cannot have them. and why i understand the compulsion to keep trying, even when the odds of conceiving are very small or, in the case of iVF, ruinously expensive.

ThiS primal need is something iVF clinics understand. So much so that last week it was reported the Competition and Markets authority (CMa) is looking into Britain’s fertility industry, which is worth £320 million, over concerns clinics are exaggerating iVF success rates and mis-selling ‘add-on’ treatments, some of which, as well as being expensive, are unnecessary or barely proven.

But people are so desperate to conceive they will do anything and spend anything. including freezing their eggs — between ten and 20 are generally harvested — a practice which has become increasingly popular and typically costs £3,500.

indeed, the number of women seeking this option has more than tripled in recent years, from 410 freezing cycles in 2012 to 1,462 in 2017.

Frozen eggs can be stored for up to ten years, but the government said yesterday that it plans to consult on raising the limit so would-be mothers have longer to decide.

On the surface, this sounds eminently sensible. But the truth is that embryo-freezing is not the holy grail many believe it to be. as fertility expert lord Winston pointed out on Radio 4 yesterday, the number of frozen eggs that result in live births is only about 1 per cent.

Since each iVF cycle costs around £5,000, and most women need more than one, it’s a lot of money for such a low success rate. But perhaps the real damage is not to women’s wallets — but to their chances of ever becoming mothers at all.

Whether it’s because women are not being properly informed or they’re choosing to ignore the reality, it seems clear they think they’ve bought an insurance policy — but if they read the small print they would realise the chances of it ever paying out are vanishingly small.

There’s never a good time to have children. There is no such thing as the perfect partner, the perfect job, the perfect life. if you put your life on hold waiting for these things, you’ll never experience anything real.

Sometimes, you have to take a leap of faith. if you don’t, you may never experience anything much at all, certainly not the messy, confusing joy of parenthood.

For some women — those with cancer or serious illnesses — eggfreezing may be a life-saver. But for those driven purely by choice, it seems to me that it offers false hope.

if you really want to be a parent, there are plenty of children in desperate need who’d love to be adopted. But don’t try to cheat Mother nature at her own game. The results are rarely, if ever, satisfactory.