L A question no woman should ever be asked

isa Snowdon, the former girlfriend of George Clooney, has said that she doesn’t want a family. “Not now,” she said this week. “It’s a weird one because it’s so hard. I left it kind of late. I didn’t find anybody that I wanted to actually be with, and I didn’t want to have kids to just [have kids].”

I’m glad that Snowdon gave an honest answer to the age-old inquiry “Do you want a family?” – though I wish she’d never been asked it in the first place. It’s such an extraordinarily personal question, to which there is no right or wrong answer, and yet women get lumbered with it all the time, or some variation of it. Even when you do have a family, you are constantly asked if you’re going to add more members to it, as though families were Pokémons you have to collect, rather than units that are created of their own accord.

Let’s stop judging women by their fertility, and start treating them like human beings in their own right instead.