Who would want to give birth slap bang in the middle of a motherhood culture war? A decreasing number of 20-somethings, for a start. This week we learnt that more than half of all women in Britain do not have children by the time they turn 30. Later motherhood, choosing not to have a family or being “childless” as the Office for National Statistics worded it, are becoming the norm.

Even that statement of bald truth serves a provocation in our tinderbox times. What is the term “childless” but an overt denigration of those who describe themselves as “child-free”?

The sisterhood is divided as seldom before. And who can blame them? Life is imitating art at a time when motherhood is under fire on every front. In print and on screen the message is unremitting: being a mother is joyless, exhausting, debilitating and, worst of all, diminishing.

The dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale has given way to a fresh hell. Take The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan’s chilling debut novel, which has been hailed as a zeitgeist masterpiece for its portrayal of mothers placed under 24/7 state surveillance and sent to reform institutions when they are deemed to have committed parenting crimes. These might include letting their child play alone in the garden, inadequately childproofing the sitting room and “coddling”, which is to say making an undue fuss of their offspring.

My first thought was: this is social media made real. This gripping read ought to be a satire but – like the bleak online hatescape – there is no room for humour or humanity, only implacable judgement and draconian consequences.

The book comes hard on the heels of last year’s I Love You but I Have Chosen Darkness, in which author Claire Vaye Watkins’s anguished narrator – who walks out on her husband and baby – observes that “motherhood had cracked me in half”. And 2020’s reimagining of 1960s novel The Group, in which Lara Feigel posits the idea that becoming a mother can be a mistake.

Without wishing to censor or even censure literary creativity, as a woman, as a mother, as a parent of two daughters, I can’t help but feel under siege.

Back in 2008 British author Rachel Cusk received vicious feedback for A Life’s Work: On Becoming A Mother. Her searing honesty and complex interrogation of her preconceptions – misconceptions – of motherhood was construed back then as the worst sort of treachery. Today, 14 years on, I doubt it would cause even a fraction of the fuss; the lid has long since blown off the myth of unconditional maternal love and the fiction that reproduction represents the highest form of female fulfilment.

But I worry the pendulum may have swung too far, even as I laugh like a drain at the BBC sitcom Motherland with its hilariously familiar tropes of suburban women striving to assert their own identities at the school gates.

As a counterpoint to the artfully curated perfection of online mummy blogs it smashes every taboo. But I can’t help thinking it destroys something more precious, too. Not by itself, but as part of a wider cultural push against the societal pressure on women to make homes and make babies – even though that pressure is already on the wane.

Having a family was never part of my own plan. I grew up the youngest of five daughters effortfully (magnificently) reared by my widowed mother. My eldest sister was married before I had left primary school. The others followed suit, as did children; all of them girls.

I saw no need to marry. Or “do the baby thing”. I watched my friends get pregnant and settle down. I smiled and coo-ed. But I knew inwardly, silently, and as it turned out, arrogantly, that I wanted to settle up, not down. I had seen first hand how motherhood was: the punishing routine, the emotional cost, the lonely relentlessness of it all, without wondering how different it might have been if my father were alive.

And so I focused on my career, friends, nieces, partner. I got a dog. Then, aged 34 on a budget flight to Bordeaux I looked over at a woman in the next row tenderly cradling her baby and in that moment I was unalterably changed.

I cried. Fat tears squeezed their way through my lashes as I clamped my eyes shut. I knew that I would never be happy until – unless – I had my own.

This is no place to bore you with the long struggle to conceive that ensued – although there’s a seemingly insatiable appetite for such stories on screen, as attested by streaming platform offerings such as Private Life, This is Us, What We Wanted and He Even Has Your Eyes, an irreverent comedy about a French-African couple who discover the longed-for baby they are about to adopt is white.

Cinema enjoys, sympathises and often empathises with a long and painful fertility journey. But once you arrive at your destination, you’re on your own.

In her 2018 movie The Escape, a glazed-over Gemma Arterton walks out on her husband and children after explaining: “I don’t care about them. I don’t care if they finish their dinner. I don’t care if they go to school or don’t go to school. I don’t care, but I make myself care. I make myself be funny and happy. I think they hate me.”

Currently Netflix is showing The Lost Daughter, based on Elena Ferrante’s novel. It follows Leda, a middle-aged divorcée played by Olivia Colman, who abandons her two daughters as children. The result is a reflection on the fierce bliss as well as the sorrows of motherhood.

My urgent need for a child was less a biological clock ticking and more of a Big Ben chiming; impossible to ignore or resist. As for my own teenage daughters, I think they would both like children eventually, but will the current white noise surrounding the sacrifices of motherhood put them off? Selfishly, I hope not.

Even deferring a family until they are past 30 is far from ideal because (again, selfishly) by then I might not be the active hands-on grandmother I long to be.

Here in 2022 we quite rightly no longer idealise motherhood. But do we really need to demonise?