I know it's an unfashionable thing to admit, but I tend to agree with the National Childbirth Trust on most issues. I found its advice – on both childbirth and breastfeeding – very helpful when I was having my babies.

But the charity's latest edict leaves me cold. According to today's Observer, the NCT has advised women to think about postponing pregnancy until the swine flu epidemic is over. Expectant mothers, says Belinda Phipps, the charity's chief executive, are thought to be at greater risk of contracting the virus. Most mothers-to-be who get it will be fine, but a small minority might have a premature birth, a miscarriage, or even a baby with birth defects.

She's been accused of scaremongering, and she probably is doing just that – but for me there's a more important issue at stake. The point is, if you wait for the stars to line up before you try to get pregnant, you'll wait for ever.

When my husband and I decided to try to conceive our first baby, we were living in a tiny flat with no garden and little prospect of ever being able to move to somewhere bigger. Two years later, when I got pregnant with baby number two, we didn't know how we could possibly survive on one salary, and I'd had a complication in my first pregnancy (pre-eclampsia) that made a second pregnancy especially frightening.

Baby number three scared us rigid because we couldn't believe we could cope with a family in which the kids would outnumber the adults; and baby number four really broke the bank. Our (new) house was too small; our car only had five seats; our finances were already at straining-point; and at almost 40 I knew I was at risk not only of a baby with chromosomal abnormalities, but of other problems in pregnancy too.

But opting to have a baby is a leap of faith. No prospective mother or father has the faintest idea how things will pan out, or how they'll cope with what's ahead. More or less the only thing you can know for certain, I now realise 17 years on, is that you are guaranteed an at-times bumpy ride, and that your emotions, your finances, your sanity and, for many people (including me), your health will be stretched as they have never been stretched before.

And it all starts with pregnancy, which like every other bit of parenting is inevitably risky. The stakes are high, and you can never rule out disaster or tragedy.

So to my mind, the risk of swine flu is just one more little risk in a vast panorama of risks associated with getting pregnant. Allow those risks to rule your thinking, and you'll never take the plunge. The NCT, of all people, should realise that.