Column

In the club again?

Eric the Heretic isn’t one to keep his views on over-age mothers to himself

Isn’t modern science wonderful? All this fuss about menopausal women getting preganant has done something serious to my testosterone and given me a great clarity. Just in time, really, because the clamour about the iniquity of pre-senile motherwood is enough to drive sense from anyone’s head.

So what if a few dotty women have babies late enough to add child benefit to pension? Most women have more sense, but the chance to cheat reality will appeal to a crazy few, who will pay almost any price to bolster their sad fantasies. Their children may have sluggish, self-obsessed and shudderingly mortal parents, but they will make it through life with only a few disabling scars - or not, as the case may be. In that sense they are no different to the kids wheeled about impoverished estates by adolescents who could pass for older siblings, or the cohorts shoved off to boarding schools in the name of good education, by parents with all the emotional warmth of a Challenger tank.

All this talk about good mothering is crap, along with the current blabbering about family values. Nobody in any government’s cabinet, nor in Whitehall, industry or our beloved trade unions, has ever given a monkey’s about good mothering. If they had, we would have coast-to-coast nurseries and a health visitor on every street corner. Instead, we get goofy technicians poring over an ever growing pile pile of medical paraphernalia, a swelling prison population and politicians with attitudes that make Serbian warlords look positively cuddly.

Good mothering costs money, and who will pay? Good mothering means putting women and children first. Not a man among us will do that, not even the women. Good mothering means being child-friendly but not child-exploitative, and who in the burgeoning leisure, toy and fast food industries can swallow that? Good mothering is about the judicious and modest use of enormous power. Which of us are stable enough to tolerate that for long?

Good luck to the batty grannies in the antenatal clinics of the ultra-commercialised future. They will nedd it, because they will carry more than babies. All our dreams of beating death, of overcoming nature and of becoming machines are nurtured in them too. All those childish desires about having what you want when you want it will swell up inside them until they pop. Where would we be without crazy old aged bimbos?