OPINION - It isn’t that I wanted kids, it’s that I didn’t want to miss out on them

It has been impossible to pick up a newspaper recently without being faced with the photograph of a smiling white woman in her thirties or forties telling us how happy she is to have decided not to have children. The articles had titles such as “Women without children aren’t selfish — we’re self-aware” and “I’m childless by choice — but please stop asking me about it” and were prompted by the publication of Ruby Warrington’s new book, Women without Children. I read the articles and my overwhelming emotion was envy — not of these women’s childlessness but of their certainty.