It's those frozen babies I feel sorry for

Young women no longer have to keep an eye on the biological clock. All they need is space in the freezer

Let me start by assuring you that I am not taking the following subject lightly. Me, frivolous? Perish the thought. Or better still freeze it. I refer of course to Emily, the ice baby as the newspapers are calling her, who was conceived from an egg which was removed from her mother's womb, frozen for six months then taken out, gently thawed and placed in a test tube to fertilise.

I shall not dwell on the medical and religious reasons for pursuing this tortuous route to childbirth except to say that, in my experience, Jehovah's Witnesses (both Emily's parents belong to that faith) are extremely decent people. The two elderly witnesses who regularly turn up at our back door with copies of their magazine, The Watchtower, once helped me clear out the garden shed.

What worries me about frozen eggs and ice babies is that women who are perfectly capable of conceiving children in the usual way, the natural way, will take advantage of this medical breakthrough for purely social reasons. No longer will ambitious young women carving out precious careers as fund managers and international consultants have to keep an eye on the biological clock. Now all they need is space in the freezer.

So what's wrong with that, chorus a furious army of hard-faced, power-dressed, high-earning, loft-living, angst-ridden thirtysomething females whose confidence took a bit of a bashing recently when they read Sylvia Ann Hewlett's bestseller Baby Hunger and discovered that, after the age of 35, female fertility decreases by 50 per cent and, after 40, by 95 per cent. What's wrong? Well, nothing I suppose except that it's flying in the face of that wise old bird Mother Nature who, for all her shortcomings, probably does know best.

Where children are concerned (and I speak from experience) women are like vessels and you know what they say about putting new wine in old bottles. Putting young eggs in old wombs has the same deleterious effect on both mother and child. I nearly said fresh eggs in stale wombs but, as every discriminating housewife knows, fresh is definitely not the same as frozen. As for stale, the sell-by date for wombs seems to be getting longer. The record I believe is still held by the Italians. The baby was born after IVF treatment and the mother, who came from Rome, was 67.

Having a baby when you are young, by which I mean under 30, is a doddle. Almost immediately your body recovers, your stretched skin, supple with the elasticity of youth, snaps back into place. You are tired certainly – who wouldn't be, getting up at midnight and 4am to feed the baby – but the fun of being a mother is so overwhelming, so all-consuming, that when, a year or so later, by design or by accident it scarcely matters, you find you are pregnant again, you are delighted.

The more the merrier was always my attitude, but only if you're young. Being young in heart, by the way, doesn't count. There's a 15-year gap between my oldest daughter and my youngest son and I have no doubt whatsoever that while the first three or even four children had the best of my maternal skills, numbers five and especially number six have had short shrift. It's as much to do with attitude as energy. When you're 20-something you are as enchanted with Christopher Robin's blue braces, and Pooh's heffalump trap as the row of wide-eyed children in pyjamas sitting up in bed listening to the story. To the cynical world-weary 40-year-old, Christopher Robin is a precocious brat in need of a good slap and trapping heffalump has taken on the same dubious overtones as fox-hunting. When you're young, motherhood is an instinct. You don't have to pore over baby manuals to find out when to give your child solids or stick her on a pot. You just get on with it.

In theory, the idea of postponing motherhood until it is convenient by temporarily freezing your assets is a good one. You have everything – salary, career, BMW, converted loft, timeshare in Tuscany, husband (maybe even your own husband). What's the time Mr Wolf? Baby time. Just to make sure, you check your stars: "The powerful planet Saturn is telling you to put down roots," says Mystic Meg. Quick, let's get those eggs defrosted then click onto the Amazon website and order everything they have on motherhood, parenting and super-vitamins to fortify the over-forties. Poor baby.