A baby means marriage, not just sharing Ikea bookcases

Eight months pregnant, I left hospital for a quick wedding

IT’S the wedding season, a nd i f you have j ust returned from watching yet another pretty young couple walk down t he aisle, it may well have crossed your mind to ask: Why do people get married?

The glib answer could be the gifts, the lists of which are now so eye- wateringly expensive that guests, as well as fathers of daughters, would be advised to start saving from birth.

The less cynical view is that people continue to fall in love and want to affirm that in front of their family and friends.

But this week we learnt they certainly don’t bother getting married for that old-fashioned reason – to start a family.

According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, of the 679,106 babies born in England and Wales last year, 48.1 per cent had unmarried parents. And that’s set to rise, catapulting us towards the t op t hree of t he European league table – France, Bulgaria and Slovenia.

Admittedly, some of that number is made up of single women deciding to give up waiting for Mr Right and go it alone.

Mercifully, the era has passed when the stigma of being an unmarried mother was so great that there was an enforced adoption policy, which has come back to haunt us all, particularly the fragile young girls who were subjected to its brutal hammer.

But a much higher percentage are babies born to co-habiting couples who actively decide not get married but still have children together.

It is easy to see how this can happen. Moving in together is relatively painless, especially if both of you are already solvent with your own flats. It starts with getting a spare key cut and ends with co- mingling Ikea bookshelves. I did it myself.

We lived together for years – bought two houses, got a dog, a cat, another dog – and then I became pregnant.

For me, this was the gamechanger. I didn’t want my child being born out of wedlock.

True, many of those 48.1 per cent of new babies will be given t heir father’s name, while others will agree to ‘blend’ their names, giving us whole new generations of people with double- barrelled signatures. But I didn’t want that either.

So, I’m not ashamed to say, I pushed hard for marriage. It felt like that small gold band was fundamental to the process of becoming a mother.

It didn’t help that the pregnancy was a tough one. I was carrying twins and knew one of them would be born dead.

Still, at its core, my desire was driven by a belief that children are our most precious gift and so need the highest protection we can offer. Marriage is an ancient contract that legally binds two people in partnership and says, ‘I accept my responsibilities. I am signing up for life (and for the life of this child).’

I could have waited until after I had given birth, and indeed many friends tried to persuade me by suggesting that the baby could be at the wedding, which sounds lovely but, for me, completely the wrong way round.

So instead, I came out of hospital for the day, eight and a half months pregnant, wearing a soft blue 1950s swing coat that embraced my vast bump, and was driven in a people carrier with a broken clutch to Chelsea Register Office, where 12 of our nearest and dearest were waiting.

To add to the gaiety of the day, our photographer was so hungover that the only images we have are wobbly snaps of the backs of heads or leering closeups of my maid of honour.

After the ceremony, we had a wedding breakfast at the old Mirabelle, where I cut the cake and then left everyone upholding the tradition of getting pieeyed as I got a cab back to my hospital bed.

It was hardly the stuff of romantic dreams. But do I still think I was right to be a married mum? I do.