As far as complex subjects go, you can’t get much thornier than fertility and motherhood. Women have fought so hard to carve out opportunities and identities beyond parenting that to confess to desperately wanting children can feel almost treacherous, or as if we’re suggesting that all the wonderful things we have – jobs, friends, partners, travel, family, passions – are somehow ‘not enough’.

The issue is further complicated by the approach often taken by tabloid newspapers when reporting on women and fertility, which can be politely summed up as: ‘shame women for wanting fulfilling careers, instead of staying at home barefoot and pregnant’. It’s hard not to want to push back against a culture that still positions motherhood as the ultimate goal for women, and to feel confused and conflicted about how much we really want it for ourselves.

Jessica Hepburn knows that discussions about motherhood, pregnancy and fertility can be difficult, and that’s exactly why she wants us to keep having them. The writer and fertility advocate, 47, stopped trying for a baby four years ago, having spent nine years trying to conceive. After being diagnosed with ‘unexplained infertility’ at 35, she and her partner underwent 11 gruelling rounds of IVF treatment, resulting in multiple miscarriages and a near-fatal ectopic pregnancy. She eventually stopped trying at 43 – something she’d always known she would do, due to the stark drop-off in IVF success rates once women reach that age.

“I’d always said that it was all about the number 43, and if I hadn’t had a baby by the time I was 43 I was going to get on with the rest of my life,” she says. “I genuinely thought: ‘I will have a baby by the time I’m 43’. You know, it must happen.”

But it didn’t, and Hepburn suddenly found herself with a life ahead of her that looked very different from the one she’d envisaged. She hadn’t been in a particular hurry to get pregnant before she started trying at 34: she’d been busy building a career as the chief executive at a London theatre, and it wasn’t until her partner came along that she’d even met anyone with whom she’d considered having a baby. Yet she’d always assumed children were in her future, somewhere.

“The shock was that actually getting pregnant isn’t as easy as everyone thinks it is,” she says. “Because we spend our whole teenage years being told not to get pregnant, you think it’s going to happen the moment you throw away contraception. And of course it can: the complexity of the situation is that it can happen immediately. But if you wait until your mid-30s, the likelihood is that it’s going to take longer.”

Why we need to keep having difficult conversations about fertility