To have a child or not is a huge decision. So why is there so little discussion of it?

More open conversations and better support are needed for people grappling with this momentous choice

Long before I became pregnant, I would ask people how they knew that they wanted to have children. Was there a lightning moment, or had the longing grown and grown until it became too much to ignore? Of course, the answers I got were as varied as people themselves. Some were able to distill it into a clear instant: taking hold of a small child's hand for the first time, or seeing a baby on a bus one day and knowing, suddenly. Others were influenced by life events: the death of a parent was a common one, leading them to reflect on how bloodlines unfurl, wanting to see a little of that beloved parent manifest in a new being. Others had always known, in their bones, since their own childhoods.

Then, for women, there was the so-called biological clock. Not so much a desire for a child, but an awareness that time could be running out, and a sort of not-wanting, a double negative: not-wanting to have not had a child. Many of these women expressed guilt at not having felt the longing", as though an innate-seeming, visceral dose of baby fever was the norm, and, in their absence of strong maternal feelings, they were deviating from it. But it does not seem that way to me, and besides, my own feelings were far from simple. At times it felt as though my body was at war with my brain. There were so many rational reasons not to become a parent, and yet the longing I felt was so powerful that it was making me unspeakably sad not to be.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist