Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: If you want it all, then don't have children

You will remember her from last year's Alan Sugar series, The Apprentice. Saira Khan was the runner-up, an Asian Muslim businesswoman, bristling with purpose, her quills always up, swollen with her own self-importance, mouthing a stream of business platitudes to give even tough Sugar a headache.

On Sunday she was on the radio talking about herself again. She is 35 and childless. (It must drive her family mad. There is no room on any shelves for Asian women who have not married and procreated even by 25.) She is concerned, she says, but really, these children, were she to plan them, get their making and birthing into her busy, busy Blackberry, would they not cost too much and reduce her earning power and the money she must make?

Don't have them, please, I wanted to advise her, you don't understand parenthood. Be good to yourself and your unborn kids and stay unattached to everyone except your own over-ambitious self.

There are many other modern young British women who are caught in the same conundrum - to have it all is to lose it all, that is what they fear. And rightly. When you have a child you surrender to inner and outer forces that nobody can prepare you for. You are never again likely to be the person you once were - and I don't just mean the tight, flat belly.

Professional women are today mothers and high-fliers, but don't let any of them say it is easily done. That is a lie they must tell the world to stop misogyny destroying their aspirations.

Thankfully, nature has given most of us parental instincts that conquer the exhaustion, panic and losses through a surge of love for the children. Nothing I have possessed or experienced can compare with the ecstasy of maternal passion.

What I fear, though, is that the instinct is weakening in modern women. Our culture, with its emphasis on material values and on narcissistic pleasures, may be selecting out the breeding impulse which gives us untold capacity for sacrifice, altruism, self-annihilation and drudgery. More and more women are delaying families, perhaps because too many genuinely can't see themselves giving up anything for their tots.

All they understand is money - and if you calculate the financial costs, it is indeed a folly to have children. If a woman has a child at 24 she loses £54,000 over her lifetime and, as we were told last week, the blighters cost thousands of pounds from the day they arrive (nappies, clothes, four-wheel prams, not counting free breast milk) to the day they leave, later and later these days. For those like Saira, it makes perfect sense to refuse parenthood and buy expensive handbags instead. How they must laugh at the fecund sisters willingly entering enslaving motherhood.

A new report by the think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research has bad news for the state. This lot of non- or late-reproducing females means there is likely to be a shortage of 90,000 babies, and a potentially disastrous demographic crisis in 20 years.

But pressing non-maternal ladettes or aspirational divas to lie still and conceive for Britain is the worst imaginable solution. The children would suffer and society would too, overrun by little repro divas and ladettes incapable of giving anything to anyone, let alone us old pensioners freezing in our flats.

Publish and be damned

Life and art need, goad, enthuse and betray each other. They must. Write about race, ethnicity and religion and you enter an even more perilous zone. Rushdie is the most dramatic example, but others have felt the heat of life denouncing their art with an unexpected ferocity. My RSC show describes how my playing Juliet in a school play nearly destroyed me. Last week's controversy over kissing schoolkids in Shakespeare's plays brought back that terror. Monica Ali probably avoids Brick Lane since the local Bangladeshis denounced her best-selling book as misrepresentative, too full of bad things. I thought the novel was over-hyped, but it is absurd to expect Ali to be a PR agency for any community. Now the supremely talented Zadie Smith is accused of painting an over-optimistic picture of London in White Teeth, too full of good things. Her detractor, Ziad Haider Rahman, was the inspiration for a character in the novel. I wonder how many black and Asian artists sink into oblivion for fear of offending their own?

* Most fair-minded people recoil when an unjust punishment is meted out to atone for a previous injustice. It happened to Professor Sir Roy Meadow, the eminent paediatrician struck off for his erroneous evidence in the trail of the solicitor Sally Clarke, who was first convicted and later cleared of murdering her two babies.

Professor Meadow told the court that the chance of two cot deaths in a family was one in 73 million. Imagine the horror of first losing a baby, and then finding yourself branded a killer. But the hysterical denunciation of Professor Meadow was also monstrous. He gave his testimony in good faith, and his concern for vulnerable children is incontestable. Other professionals dealing with parental abuse are similarly ostracised. Now that a judge has exonerated Professor Meadow, perhaps these individuals will find new heart to do what they have to, even if it ruptures our comforting myths and brings down the wrath of society.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk