Child-free women like me aren't tragic figures – whether or not your cervix dilated to 10cm once has very little bearing on your happiness

Andrea Leadsom pointed out that bearing children gave her 'a very real stake in the future'. This, as opposed to women like Jennifer Aniston and myself, who would smash their barren fists upon a nuclear detonator at a second’s notice screaming, ‘The world ends after meeeeee!’

Jennifer Aniston is sick of the media asking why having children 'didn't happen' for her (Getty)

Following another fortnight in which Jennifer Aniston has weathered media scrutiny over whether her miniscule pasta-related spare tire is a first trimester bump, the actress has written in a blog on the Huffington Post that she is “not pregnant” but instead “fed up”. That’s not pregnant, guys. Let’s all check again next month!

If it’s any conciliation to Aniston, Britain inflicts the same Womb101 scrutiny on Kylie Minogue, who has defiantly failed to produce a tiny Minoguette, or given the media any tangible proof she’s trying, or wept publicly for the cavernous introspective hole her childlessness has left. In the past month, even our new Prime Minister Theresa May faced the looming question mark hanging over all successful child-free women.

First, May was cajoled by a newspaper to shed some light on why a baby “hadn’t happened”. I’m never sure, personally, how to answer this one. What does the questioner want? Graphs? A Powerpoint? A long country-and-western-style misery ballad? Nevertheless, after May offered some vague pointers about her gynaecological situation – clearly to placate the public – Andrea Leadsom swept in, pointing out that bearing children gave her a “very real stake in the future”. This, as opposed to women like May, Aniston, Minogue and myself who would smash their barren fists upon a nuclear detonator at a second’s notice screaming, “The world ends after meeeeee!”

Of course, Leadsom stood aside after the mother-blunder, but I put that more down to the ruthless efficiency of Conservative Party in leadership selection matters, coupled with Leadsom experiencing her own first real taste of a Twitterstorm. Days later, a Scottish newspaper presented May on its cover as Cruella De Ville, a character who is childless and ergo has quickly slipped into a life of unchecked vanity, greed and abject cruelty.

A day later, Katie Hopkins wrote peculiarly that child-free women like May – and myself, I presume – are weird but make good leaders as we have no Achilles heel. On reading that, I totted up mentally all of the people I love and would, if push came to shove, kill for. It turns out that, like most people, I have more Achilles heels than a stumbling caterpillar.

The most frustrating part of Womb101 is that it really, really shouldn’t be an issue. The numbers of women now remaining child-free are merely the result of 100 relatively short years of access to education, contraceptive advice and the notion that we now have choices. Legions of us over the past 20 years have begun to realise that staying child-free was not a remotely tragic option. We were literate, numerate, independently propelled and had learned to crave the cerebral nourishment of a hard day’s work. While many of us still longed for the smell of a baby’s head, lots of us simply didn’t. Or we did, but couldn’t do that and worked out another path. That should have been fine. It is fine. Child-free women are not, I often want to scream, perpetually hurting.

Aniston didn’t mention in her essay some of the highlights of not being a mother. She might have said that being baby-free means a lot more disposable income, or how child-free women have more freedom to travel, to further their educations, or to merely go to bed really bloody early after a terrible day and emerge reborn at 7am. Child-free women can keep a beautiful, clutter-free home far easier. They can invest in foreign property instead. They have more time for a locked-on relationship with a lot of sex, plus time to pencil numerous projects and hare-brained schemes into the diary. They have time to be “the glue” in their extended family plans for Christmas and birthdays. They are good aunts, stepmothers and godmothers, as well as having half an eye on taking on their friends’ kids if the very worst happened.

What Aniston, May or any childfree woman cannot say is that life will be forever “happy” or “complete” for them, because nobody can. Life is hard. It has pros and cons and moments of exquisite joy followed vile curveballs. Life is, at its very best, composed of periods of things being momentarily OK until another roaring shitstorm appears. Whether your cervix dilated to 10cm back in 1992 makes not one scrap of difference to your spiritual “completeness” levels. It’s a difficult idea, I know. But not as ridiculous as plastering “barren women” on magazine front covers in Dalmatian skin jackets.