Jody Day can remember the day her world fell in. She was ‘44 and a half’, divorced and her five-year relationship had just ended in a ‘horrendous, stormy break-up’.

At that moment she knew conclusively she would never be a mother. The emotion was like a bereavement.

‘I’m amazed I managed to keep my fantasy going as long as I did,’ Jody says. ‘But even in my denial I realised: “That’s it. If I met someone else tomorrow, we’d need to know each other at least a year before we could even consider IVF. I’m too old. It’s done.”’ 

Six years after that momentous day, Jody, 51, has a life full of friendship and fulfilling work. She retrained as a psychotherapist and set up the Gateway Women group to support and empower women aged 35 and over who are either still living in hope of becoming mothers or coming to terms with the knowledge they never will. 

And now she is publishing a book of advice, Living the Life Unexpected: 12 Weeks to Your Plan B for a Meaningful and Fulfilling Future Without Children.

Childlessness is a huge issue in the UK. Data released by the Office for National Statistics reveals that one in five women born in the 1960s has turned 45 without having children, a rate nearly double that of their mothers. 

Only once before has the UK childlessness rate reached one in five – in the 1920s, a decade overshadowed by war and economic slump. 

Of course, women born in the 60s have had far more freedom of opportunity: going to university in hitherto unprecedented numbers, having fulfilling careers, choosing cohabitation over marriage, taking on mortgages. Not everyone wants to be a parent.

But, of the 1.5 million women in the UK in their 40s and 50s that Jody estimates are childless, she says that only ten per cent are so by choice.

Another ten per cent are childless for medical or infertility reasons. That leaves 80 per cent who have ended up ‘childless by circumstance’, she says, borrowing a phrase from new research by Professor Renske Keizer of Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

Many in the 45-plus cohort of women (and I include myself here) will say they didn’t consciously choose not to have children, it just crept up on them. Jody calls it ‘the non-decision that becomes a decision’. 

So are we too picky? Obsessed with our careers? Jody argues that there is no single reason, ‘but one of the biggest is not meeting a partner, or not meeting one in time,’ she says.

‘Or your partner not wanting children, or not wanting more children. A lot of women spend their 30s going through unpromising relationships.’