Ah, the magic of birth! The unadulterated fulfilment of those first few hours and days of new motherhood! Isn’t it wonderful?

I’m afraid to say, I didn’t think so. Or rather, I’m not afraid to say it any more – but it did seem rather awkward at the time, what with the welter of “how amazing is it?” text messages and the midwife barking at the weeping woman in the next bed that she was “going to have to get used to this”.

Don’t get me wrong – I couldn’t more completely adore the human results of it. And, of course, there’s little worse than imagining that your personal experiences throw up a mirror to everyone else’s. To describe the conversation around birth as highly charged is a bit like saying Isis is slightly unmannerly. Even if someone tells you that they want to give birth under the care of a shaman halfway up a mountain in Tibet – or close an entire country’s airspace, as Angelina Jolie did when she chose to have one of hers in Namibia – you have to just say “That choice wasn’t for me,” in the most neutral voice possible, or people think you’re telling them what to do. I’m not. As my mother always points out: “Darling, it’s all a trauma. You just have to get through it any way you can.”

Still, as someone who has given birth three times in the space of three and a half years, each time becoming more able to look around me in the postnatal ward and see it unfolding for others, I wish it weren’t remotely political to say that the experience is very often pretty awful at what, for many women, is absolutely the most vulnerable time in their lives.

There are many reasons not to dwell too heavily on the indescribably heartbreaking case of Charlotte Bevan, who disappeared from a Bristol hospital this week with her four-day-old daughter before both their bodies were found in the Avon Gorge. There is the unimaginable horror of it for her family; there is the rawness; there is the aspect that I mentioned of each individual case being its own mass of complexities and something that mustn’t be held up as an example. But God, the utter, utter tragedy of it must have struck a chord with mothers up and down the country who don’t even have experience of the cruel mental health problems Charlotte Bevan clearly endured.

For innumerable mothers – perhaps most mothers – those haunting images of her carrying her baby out of the ward in her slippers will have taken them back to other wards, other corridors, other loneliness. And however infinitesimal their struggles must retroactively have felt in the light of her story, there will have been that acute pang of fellow feeling, of sympathy in its purest sense.

The most gratefully I have ever been thanked for anything was on the postnatal ward with my second baby, when the first-time mother in the bed opposite had been crying and calling out for ages at 3am (nobody came; yes, I know they are unmanageably overstretched), and I went over and sat on her bed. Among lots of other cobblers, I said: “Oh God, you mustn’t feel remotely weird – with my first one I just felt completely fucking awful. It’s just a massive fucking trauma.” We managed a snotty laugh about it, and she said: “Your swearing’s actually really reassuring.” (Hey, it may not be in the trendier new baby manuals, but not calling a shitter a shitter … well, “that choice wasn’t for me”.)

How can we make things better? More money, in the end. But there is only less money, and I can’t help feeling slightly suspicious of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s advice this week that it is better for women to give birth at home or in birth centres than in our hospitals. Each to their own, I stress again – but let’s not ignore the fact that it is certainly cheaper.

I did shriek “What?!” when someone on the radio said it meant women were less likely to “have to endure an epidural”. With my first baby I did 48 hours of natural before I got to “endure” an epidural, and there wasn’t a moment in the subsequent remaining 11 hours of that birth that I wasn’t enduringly worshipping that epidural.

By the time of my third, five months ago, I was a right bossy cow about what I wanted because I knew the drill. For reasons I shan’t bore you with, I got them to induce me at 39 weeks, at 10am, with the epidural going in first, and it was all a dream. Until the baby went back to back and they very nicely pointed out that the epidural doesn’t deal with that pain. Some bits of the trauma are just unplannably unavoidable. But it was all over in time for my daughter to catch the Nigeria v Argentina World Cup game that evening, during which she seemed to reckon everything was miles offside. (Or was that just the Moro reflex?)

I didn’t linger in the hospital – but no one can wait to get out of there these days, can they? You can’t wait not to be in a room with several other women, with none of you able to help the fact that your baby starts screaming in the night just after they’ve got theirs to sleep, and consequently no one sleeps at all the whole time they’re there.

It wasn’t always like this. My mother had three children with the NHS in the 1970s, and looks back on each hospital stay with incredible fondness. Those were the days of lying in, you see – she had 10 days on the ward after I was born (at a hospital on London’s Hyde Park Corner that was eventually sold off, and which is now a five-star hotel).

But it wasn’t 10 days of sleeplessness so disorientating that you can perceive a harassed midwife as a bully. Most crucially – and most unfashionably today – the babies were taken off them and away to a nursery after the 10pm feed, and returned at 6am having been fed by nurses with expressed milk (or formula if they preferred) in the middle of the night.

By the time the mothers went home they’d had 10 nights of sleep instead of what we have today, which is arriving home hallucinatorily exhausted less than 24 hours after labour – or a couple of days after major surgery – and being expected to take to it like a duck to water. My mother relaxed enough to become friends with the women she was in with (imagine!), and all the women were taught hilarious but probably quite helpful things, like how to bath a baby on your lap using only one hand, or something. I always imagine Hattie Jacques being in charge.

That was the old definition of postnatal care. I know there’s a new one, but the more I’ve been through it, the more I speak to friends, the more cuts that are threatened, and the more I hear about Charlotte Bevan’s story, I think the most tactful thing I can say about it is … it’s not my choice.