It’s a truth universally acknowledged that in your 30s it’s all hen dos, weddings and babies and in your 40s it’s all rehab, divorce and failed IVF.

Which is why, last week, when Naomi Campbell, 53, announced the birth of her second child, saying: “it’s never too late to become a mother”, I was delighted.

Yet I’m afraid for us mere mortals it isn’t quite that simple and I go to great lengths to explain to my younger friends that the diametric opposite is true.

The fact is that for most women their 30s are largely a race against time as it suddenly hits them that for 99.9 per cent of women the cut-off point for having a healthy baby naturally is around 40, and your fertility drops dramatically at 35.

Freezing your eggs? An expensive dreamland. Among women over 36, the proportion of frozen eggs that lead to a baby is just 3.3 per cent.

Whatever it might look like for celebrities, the truth is for anyone over 45 having a child will almost certainly involve surrogates, with the endless ethical complications that process involves, donor eggs and an eye-wateringly expensive bill.

About one in five women over 45 in Britain have no children and those who do are having fewer, on average 1.6. However, when you ask women how many they want, the answer is 2.3.

For us women the dream was to have it all — a career and kids, which is perfectly achievable within reason, but I fear the pendulum has swung so far we may have simply swapped life as stay-at-home mothers for a life spent perpetually working in offices. We didn’t all want to ‘just’ be mothers, but we didn’t dream of never being mothers at all.

Of all the terrible things done to women I feel they aren’t noticing that we’ve now designed a world in which having no children or fewer than they want isn’t the exception it’s the rule. Because the sad thing is that by the time a lot of women decide that they want them, tragically, it is too late.

https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/naomi-campbell-women-children-ivf-age-b1092062.html