When journalist and TV presenter Shelly Horton spoke about her decision not to have children in a magazine seven years ago, the feedback was overwhelming. While privately, women contacted her to thank her, publicly, men – far more than women – attacked her for her choice. “I got hate mail, I got trolled” says Horton, now 45.

“I had men on Twitter say, ‘A woman who doesn’t want a child is not a real woman.' I had people saying I was a waste of a uterus. It was really foul, and really upsetting.”

Fast-forward to 2018, and Horton says much has changed. Overwhelmingly, people react positively to her (and her husband’s) decision not to have kids. “I don’t know if it’s ‘Me Too’ or the Time’s Up movement, although I think that’s part of it,” she says. “But it’s actually becoming okay to not be the same as everyone else.”

A glance at the data would seem to support this. The Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts couples without children to be the fastest growing household type, overtaking households with children by 2031. The proportion of women between 40 and 44 who were childfree in the 1970s was 10 per cent – that figure had doubled by 2005.