Everyone has mummy issues these days – including climate scientists. A recent study made headlines by suggesting that the number-one thing a person can do to reduce their carbon footprint is to have fewer children. Right on cue, a neo-Malthusian chorus seized on the study as another opportunity to shame women for their reproductive choices. Averting climate catastrophe is a collective responsibility – but it’s far more comfortable to blame your mother, or someone else’s, for every social ill.

I’ve just crossed the invisible rubicon between the age when you’re shamed and terrified out of the very idea of breeding and the age when you’re coerced and cajoled into it – if you have a uterus, of course. If you don’t, you can pretty much sit back and wait for some woman to do the donkey work of organising your genetic legacy, safe in the knowledge that you’re unlikely to be judged on your reproductive choices. I’m consistently taken aback by the number of men my age and older who speak offhandedly about their “future children”, without having planned in the slightest for the arrival of these notional sprogs – simply assuming that it’ll happen someday, when they’ve had time to dedicate themselves to their life’s work.

“Environmental concerns” are, of course, a reasonable excuse for the decision not to reproduce. But why should we need excuses? Speaking as a 30-year-old woman with no current plans to procreate, I profoundly resent the constant reminders about the apparently deafening ticking of my “biological clock”. The insistence that I produce either a baby or a bloody good excuse is unremitting, from friends, strangers, internet busybodies and advertising algorithms trying to sell me pregnancy tests and nappy rash cream. I find it a dispiriting example of gendered double standards, but mostly I find it goddamned rude. I’ve got my deflections and explanations lined up, the weary reassurances that I love babies and can’t wait to be an auntie – but the truth is much simpler. The truth is that I just don’t want to. I can’t be bothered. It looks like a huge amount of work, and I’ve already got a lot on, but even if I didn’t, I shouldn’t have to say anything more than “I don’t want to”. Nobody should. In this, as in every other question affecting women’s basic bodily autonomy, “no” ought to mean “no” – and “no further questions”.

Babies are rather like hard drugs: once you’ve had one, it’s surprisingly hard to simply put it down and walk away

Nobody should be peer pressured into pregnancy – babies, after all, are rather like hard drugs, in that once you’ve had one, it’s surprisingly hard to simply put it down and walk away. That tends to be frowned upon, and not just by the baby. You can’t just dabble in these things. And having a baby can be a gateway that turns into something more serious, like having a toddler or, in extreme cases, a teenager.

Motherhood is a matter of consent. It is now generally understood that pressuring women and girls to have sex is unacceptable. Why, then, is it OK to pressure us into having kids?

Why, for that matter, is it OK to pressure us out of it? Why should any pregnant woman have to apologise for the pitter-patter of tiny carbon footprints – at least until the parsimonious old hypocrites running the world have actually committed to not cooking the human race to death.

For most millennials, of course, this is still a distressingly academic question. Women in their late 20s and early 30s are increasingly delaying motherhood for the simple reason that we can’t afford it, leading to some stern admonitions about social responsibility and the future of the welfare state from those who might have been better placed ensuring we still had one. The problem is that right now, women “of childbearing age” are very often, and rather more urgently, of rent-paying age and have accumulated fifty grand’s worth of student debt. By this stage, we’ve had 20 years of teachers and tabloids warning us against the indulgence of having kids we can’t afford. What’s a millennial girl to do? If we don’t have kids, we’re selfish; if we do, we’re thoughtless harlots out to drain hard-working male taxpayers of their beer money.

‘What’s a millennial girl to do?’ … Laurie Penny. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

During the age of Enlightenment, revolutionary thinkers upended society with the notion that every man has a right to individual liberty and autonomy. Almost all of them stopped short at extending the same courtesy to women, whose main duty was still to endure repeated and dangerous pregnancies. Women were expected to raise and bear autonomous individuals, not become them. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the finest thinkers of the 18th century, backed up her salvo for female intellectual worth by arguing that education would make women better mothers. We’ll never know if motherhood itself might have changed her mind – Wollstonecraft died in childbirth.

More than 200 years later, we are still blaming mothers for everything that’s wrong with the world, apparently including climate change. The modern ideal of motherhood still burdens women with most of the responsibility for social reproduction and almost none of the power. We’re expected to meet impossible standards of childrearing without inconveniencing our employers or our fellow citizens. We’re still expected to quietly get on with it. I’m not sure that’s good enough anymore.

If we want to grow up as a society, we’ve got to get over our mummy issues. If we want to ensure that the next generation arrives healthy and on schedule, we could always buck the historical trend and actually trust women. We could abandon shame and coercion, and give women choices. Real choices, choices that come with resources to back them up. We could make childcare a common good, and housing a public right. We could make contraceptive, reproductive and maternal healthcare available to anyone who needs it. We could recognise, finally, that bearing and raising children is not a sacred duty. It is not biological destiny. It is work – hard, real, important work, work that should be chosen freely, or not at all.

• Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Consenting Adults is published by Bloomsbury.