Seven years ago I wrote an article about how I and my 30-something friends hated being dictated to about our fertility by, it seemed, mainly male experts and commentators. I blithely asserted that we had plenty of time to come to the decision about having children and dismissed the doom-laden “Have you left it too late?” headlines as out of touch with modern science. Mariella Frostrup, I wrote, was our heroine – a woman who was in her 40s when she had two children, seemingly with no problem. As a health reporter, I would regularly go to international conferences where the dominant theme appeared to be the ever-increasing pregnancy success rate for women in their late 30s and 40s.