I'm a grown-up woman entrusted to make big personal decisions - who I live with or without, where I live and what I do each day, even if I want to donate a spare kidney to a friend or bone marrow to a stranger. But there's one bit of my life that isn't left to my own discretion. Everyone seems to have a right to tell me what to do with my womb.
All week I've been listening to experts arguing about how my fertility should be managed. In the Maternity Matters report released on Tuesday, the health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, promised a more "woman-focused" maternity service, in particular the choice for a woman to have a home birth. And yesterday, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) published a consultation paper suggesting fertility clinics should, as a general rule, implant just one rather than two fertilised eggs during IVF treatment.
I wouldn't mind such a plethora of advice about becoming a parent if it had my welfare and that of any future children at heart. But it doesn't. It pretends to be about choice and wellbeing, when it's really about regulating parenthood. It's about corralling us all into being certain kinds of mothers.
Hewitt's promise to give each waddling one of us the opportunity to have our waters break on an Ikea rug while listening to a panpipe CD in our own sitting room is welcomed by everyone, from the Royal College of Midwives to the National Childbirth Trust. That's giving women choice in childbirth. But when the HFEA threatens to reduce choice by advising against implanting two embryos to reduce the complications of multiple births, everyone hoorahs again. Even though that's robbing women of choice in childbirth.
Why is some choice good for women and some choice bad? Because home birth is implicitly deemed "natural", the modern equivalent of giving birth under a bush. If anything unnatural is involved, however, then the choice is removed. Suddenly pregnancy isn't about fulfilling our Earth Mother role, but about too many women choosing to take too many risks. This clash of choices is most absurd in Maternity Matters, where the theoretical choice to have a home birth is lauded but there's no mention of any right to have an "unnatural" pain-killing epidural.
The HFEA proposals are more complicated. They seek to limit women's choice on the familiar argument that twins and triplets put the mothers and, in particular, the future children's lives in danger. I know all about these risks. I have a disabled child, conceived by the old-fashioned method and born with very little medical intervention. With the knowledge of what it means to bring up a child with a disability, I still decided to have two embryos implanted during fertility treatment. I am all too aware of the risks. What the HFEA needs to recognise is that this was a risk I was prepared to take.
Parenthood is never a risk-free zone and it's foolish to presume it can ever be. HFEA chair Shirley Harrison talks of "avoidable risks", as if having a baby is like DIY; as long as you do it safely, you'll be fine. There's no such guarantee. However much you love your child, they might still develop leukaemia or a drug addiction. However much you avoid having twins and triplets, you could still give birth to a baby with a disability. That, in its own awkward way, is the wonder of such a flawed world.
When it comes to childbirth, the definition of natural is a fluid one. The "unnatural" practices of surrogacy, sperm donation and adoption have always been practised and will continue to be, however hard regulators try to constrain them. You just cannot legislate for conception. But you can embrace the diversity of options, whatever they may be. You have no choice.
· Dea Birkett is a writer on disability and family issues
