What makes a mother in the modern world?

Women of retirement age, pre-teen girls, lesbian couples, widows... all are new mothers, with everything from scientific innovation to sheer ignorance playing a part. Should we mourn the death of the traditional family, or take the new rules of motherhood on board? Deborah Orr reports

For centuries, motherhood was considered to be the seemly destiny of all decent, healthy women. The problems of infertile couples were generally and often unfairly laid at the female's door, or simply covered up with the sudden arrival of an adopted baby who might never be told that mummy and daddy were not, strictly speaking, mummy and daddy at all.

Now, after a brief period in which motherhood as the age-old prescription for female fulfillment was questioned as a limiting, trammelling tyranny, there is a growing idea that the achievement of mother- hood ought – far from being taken more lightly, or rejected altogether without prejudice – to be enshrined as a human right.

We'll know how far up the flagpole the concept has managed to get in the new year, when Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, president of the high court's family division, presides over a test case that essentially presumes such a right to exist, and by implication calls for its legal recognition.

Central to the case is the plight of Natallie Evans, although her lawyer is also representing three other women in similar situations who came forward as a result of the publicity Evans's legal challenge attracted. There is no doubt that Evans is in an awful, desperate position. Diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she was told that the only treatment would leave her unable to have children. Therefore, prior to the treatment, she paid £3,000 to have 11 of her eggs fertilised with her 25-year-old boyfriend's sperm, and six resulting embryos frozen. The relationship later ended, and the ex-boyfriend, Howard Johnston, contacted the clinic which had undertaken the treatment, exercising his right to withdraw consent, and have the embryos destroyed. Evans is challenging his right to reject fatherhood with her, as it would destroy her right to motherhood.

The right to motherhood is a strange idea, I think, but also one that speaks volumes about our ability to assimilate scientific advancement and take it for granted. In the old world of parenting, just 25 years ago, the very thought of such a right would be entirely without meaning. Either you had children, or – sometimes tragically, sometimes stoical, and sometimes deliberately – you didn't. Then, in 1978 with the birth of Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby", the age dawned in which motherhood need not be limited either by biological constraint or by failure to find an appropriate partner.

We've been testing the ground ever since, with the sort of family a child can thrive in becoming an ever-widening area of contention. To a large degree, the introduction of science into the business of conception has prompted philosophical quest- ions over a process that, until recently, was at the mercy of nature. As parenthood has fallen within the realms of laboratory control, so has come a wider need or desire to define what parenthood is, and ought to be.

At the same time, the forward march of social liberalisation has provoked questions of a quite different, and sometimes quite contradictory kind. While in one direction, boundaries stopping women from conceiving are pushed at hard, in another, panic about the sort of circumstances children are born into is rampant. Children born to girls who are still children themselves, or to individuals whose lifestyles are too chaotic to be conducive to the provision of stable upbringings, are seen as an ever-growing problem, beyond the reach of legislation. Indeed, it is true that Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe, and one of the highest rates of children being brought up in poverty in the developed world – linked to single parenthood, in many cases.

Sometimes, usually while reading the Daily Mail, it appears as if the entire parental population must be divided into just two categories of undesirables – single mothers and deadbeat dads. Neither, until quite recently, was tolerated in polite society. Single mothers, if alone at the time of pregnancy, would be dragooned into shotgun marriages or into giving up their child for adoption. As for deadbeat dads, so little input was expected from men into the rearing of their children, that the concept was alien. Despite what the statistics may tell us, there is more active fathering going on now than there has ever been.

For beyond the hysteria and the deadening stereotype, there lies the admission, in all but the most extreme of circumstances, that biological parenthood is hugely important – to children, that is, rather than parents. The emphasis is very much – perhaps too much – on biological motherhood. But still fathers, with the co-operation, sadly sometimes unforthcoming, of mothers, can now enjoy more connection with the daily lives of their children than they ever have.

There have always been deadbeat dads, some of them tolerated by long-suffering women, sometimes simply walking away from their partners. In the past young girls, or women unable to bring up children, did, of course, become pregnant, but powerful social taboos pressurised them in to giving up their babies. Once too, there was no assisted reproduction to help infertile couples, but instead a reliable stream of infants torn from their unmarried mothers' arms. Now, some feel, the tendency is in the other direction, with at-risk children encouraged to stay too long in abusive situations. Adoptive parents want babies, while social services have older children, with behavioural problems, who are difficult to place.

It is sobering to learn that while the adoption services are pilloried for needlessly lengthy and politically correct decisions, many adoptions still do fail, at huge cost to children who find themselves rejected a second time. On the other hand, while the new situations thrown up by assisted reproduction are useful in attempting to sort out our ideas of what constitutes a family, so too is the continuing and heated debate around adoption. The two developing discussions are closely linked, for while all around Britain people are making a decent fist of bringing up families in all sorts of unconventional configurations, it is in the rules about adoption that the most prescriptive views of what a family can be are often seen.

For example, it is rather absurd, as well as oddly encouraging, to see that even the Conservative Party is no longer united in its disapproval of unmarried or gay adoptive parents. For the truth is that while the right can disapprove of natural parents who are gay or unmarried, it cannot stop them: single women and gay and lesbian couples are busily making their own reproductive arrangements up and down the country.

Not everyone may have the financial resources of Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow, who spent some £250,000 on gaining twin daughters in California. They had previously been turned down for adoption in Essex. But there are plenty of gay men who have formed alliances with women willing to have the child of one of them and share the parenting with both, and even more lesbians opting for the more straightforward business of donor insemination.

Yet amidst all this highly liberal familial redefinition, there is still a powerful stream of the most paralysing kind of conventional thinking, centred on idealising motherhood and deeply concerned with how a mother looks. This tendency can be seen in our reactions to the most straightforward of the assumptions assisted reproduction has challenged, which are our ideas about the age a mother ought to be. A few years ago, Elizabeth Buttle, at 60, became Britain's oldest mother. She lied about her age to receive fertility treatment from Britain's highest-earning doctor, the assisted reproduction guru Professor Ian Craft. And very satisfied she is with her deception, too. She feels she has done much to help other older mothers, by setting a generous age benchmark for future elderly mothers. She certainly seems to believe that a baby is not just a baby, but also a female's right.

Such philosophical matters are less pressing for Jenny Teague, who became Britain's youngest mother when she gave birth not far into her 12th year. Jenny became a mother not by exercising her rights, real or imagined, but by paying for her ignorance, after a one-off coupling with a 13-year-old at her cousin's home. She knew about condoms, but thought she was too young to get pregnant. She didn't learn any different until her older sister noticed she had stretch marks on her fattening tummy.

Yet while the sorrier side of social liberalisation has much to do with the plummetting age of female conception, science has played its part here, too. Recent scientific opinion has it that Jenny Teague, in her belief that she could not conceive at 11, was in one sense an old-fashioned girl. The ability of our daughters to become pregnant at earlier and earlier ages has much to do with Western food science. Girls enter pubescence, new theories propound, when their body-fat ratio hits a certain level. So our rich, modern diet, not just our rich, modern obsession with sex as a sales agent and transforming leisure pursuit, is turning out an army of procreatively mature pre-teens, their bodies, if not their minds, ever more ready to reproduce. It's a dastardly biological conundrum: while some women's lives demand that they should defer having planned families until later, some children's bodies are straining to achieve the opposite. With girls reaching reproductive maturity earlier, holding that limited store of eggs, they are likely also to move earlier into reproductive difficulty.

Perhaps, this is even part of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's lament about "baby hunger", the phenomenon whereby professional women think they will be able to defer motherhood until their career is established, only to find that their own bodies, and even science, are not so easily fitted into the schedule. Women are warned now that their eggs start to decay earlier than they may think, and that even at 36 they may have suffered a significant downturn in their ability to conceive. Ironic then, that this is the very age at which assisted reproduction is no longer available on the National Health Service. As far as NHS policy is concerned, it would appear, a woman's right to motherhood, or at least the right to try to attain it, lasts for only a couple of decades.

There are no such constraints in the booming sector that is private assisted reproduction. While Elizabeth Buttle felt the need to lie in order to have her ovaries artificially stimulated, Prof Craft did treat Lynn Bezant, a mother of three grown-up offspring, who had a further pair of twins at 57 with the professor's assistance.

Is 57 too old for maternity? The reaction of many people chimes with that of the writer India Knight, whose response is robustly uncompromising: "Yukky." But, beyond that gut reaction, there are not many persuasive arguments against the practical existence of older mothers. When pressed, most people offer up the scenario whereby the children of older mothers will lose them early in life. Such an eventuality is hardly desirable, but at the same time, even younger parents cannot be sure they will be around to see their responsibilities through. Anyway, in the latter case, it is often the grandparents who step into the gap, and nobody complains then that the taking on of such a responsibility is inappropriate.

My own belief about this part of the assisted conception debate is that it is marginal. Certainly, some women will want to have children late in life, but most will be sensible about it. After all, men have forever been able to choose deferment, yet, on the whole, prefer to have children when they are still fairly sprightly themselves. Men who have children very late in life continue to inspire the "yuk factor", even though they don't have to turn to science to underwrite their dubious achievements.

And, of course, older women – Elizabeth Buttle among them – are keen to advance the equality argument when it suits them. She claimed that if Charlie Chaplin could have children late in life, then why shouldn't she? At least, I think that was the point she was making, though it wouldn't be surprising to learn that, right now, some woman is about to give birth to a new offspring from Charlie. It wouldn't be the first time, after all, that a woman has given birth to the child of a man who was dead at the time of conception. Diane Blood is only the best known of some 40 women known to have gone down that controversial route.

Now that men don't even have to be living to have children, what sort of right is there to being a father, or at least some say in whether you become one biologically and whether your can be involved with the child's upbringing? In Diane Blood's case, she found a way – not under British law, but abroad – to have her husband's child without his consent. Now Natallie Evans is fighting to have a child under similar circumstances – but this time the man whose lack of consent she wishes to override is alive. Clearly, when looked at in the light of this case, the "right to motherhood" must have an influence on the "right to fatherhood" as well.

Is desire of Natallie Evans to have Howard Johnston's baby more important than his wish that she should not? When matters take their natural course, the father of a pregnant woman's child has no legal right of intervention in the course of the pregnancy. Even if a women goes ahead with a pregnancy against his wishes, he is still, in law, financially responsible for the resulting child.

Evans argues that her foetuses are being treated differently because they are not in her body. Here is the crux of her claim of discrimination. If a pregnant woman has the right to have a child, then why doesn't a woman whose embryo lies in a freezer? It is a highly contradictory argument, this one that demands science should replicate nature, especially since it is clearly the application of science that has resulted in this dilemma. Yet in another sense, the demand enshrined in the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act that the consent of both parties is needed before procedures can continue is in keeping with the scientific aim of improving upon nature rather than replicating it. Whether parents are gay, straight, male or female, old or young, the thing that their putative offspring need is commitment.

Even the children of donor insemination tend to want enough commitment from the donor parent for them to be able to track down and meet the parent one day. And while the 1990 Act set down that donor anonymity would be granted and children would not have that right, there is a strong chance that stalwart campaigning might force the recasting of the Act in the favour of children and the right to know their biological parents. It would be wonderful if Mr Johnston could find the strength to commit himself that much, or that little. But if he can't commit, then he has nothing to offer to any child, and therefore it's right for him not to want to have one.

For in all the talk of the rights of mothers and fathers, somehow the opportunity we have now to plan our lives in order to make the needs of children paramount gets lost. Contraception, abortion, assisted reproduction, surrogacy, social liberalisation – we have all of these at our disposal to make every child a wanted one, with parents who are committed to offering the best possible start in life. Until we can work out a way of creating a society that puts birth rights first, we should be a little less hasty about the rights we ascribe to potential parents, whatever tragic hand life deals them. Some- times the most responsible reproductive decision an adult can make is that they're not cut out for parenthood. The right to choose, and choose wisely, is as much of a right as any prospective parent ought to need.