A strong sense of entitlement, as we have seen, brings unreality in its wake, whether it is to bankers or MPs. And, for a long time, running in parallel with advances in the technology of fertility, there has been a growing sense of entitlement about having a child. Of course I am thinking of 66-year-old, soon to be 67, Elizabeth Adeney, the successful businesswoman who had fertility treatment in the Ukraine and is shortly to give birth to her first baby. Outside the Ukraine and the Adeney household, you would have to search hard to find anybody who has unmixed emotions about this impending birth.

Mrs Adeney is not asking for anybody’s opinion and not telling anybody her views. She is a highly competent woman who has the financial security to ensure her child’s future and to buy all the help and care necessary. She has chosen to have the baby. The baby will be born and I wish mother and child enormous happiness. I have no doubt there will be love and joy. But that’s not all.

I hear from many people at all stages in the cycle of family life and everything I hear confirms the commonsense view that the best chance of a child’s happiness comes with a loving extended family in which all the pressures and duties of family life come in manageable stages and with mutual support. This ideal can collapse at any stage between conception and death and then happiness is rewon by making the best of it.

If a teenager were to write to me and say that she was already pregnant and was choosing to have the baby, I would want her to put doubt aside and concentrate on preparing to be the best mother she could be. I don’t wish any less for Mrs Adeney. But if she were my friend I would have done my best to dissuade her from this choice and I would be arguing from the philosophical base of considering the implications of an individual action were it to become a universal law. The world will not become a better place if women carry on reproducing into their late sixties. This is a convoluted way of saying that my first reaction would have been: are you mad?

A woman who has everything but a baby and who decides, out of kilter with natural timing, that a baby is the one thing she must have, is certainly not thinking of the baby. Still less is she thinking of the school child, of the teenager, of the young person starting out in life in their twenties who has a parent in their late eighties to care for. I wonder if she sees herself at her child’s wedding. I wonder if she has realised that her bargain does not include being a grandparent or supporting her child in having his or her own children.

I am talking feelings here, not only simple practicalities and facts.

Money may provide physical comfort and bought-in care, both to parent and child, but it won’t ease the guilt or the resentment that a young person might feel when their life is ruled by an ageing parent. It won’t solve the loneliness of being out of time with your own generation.

Wanting a baby is a primal force, but nature stops wanting to reproduce itself after a certain age and it seems wise to go with it. There are plenty of other things to do with one’s life. A mother in her late sixties may declare that she feels as young as ever but she is fooling herself. With each passing year she is more likely to be surprised by illness or frailty.

And in stubbornly insisting on being youthful ad infinitum she is turning her back on some of the blessings that come after the menopause. Thank God for the freedom of not being ruled by hormones and desire as we age. Thank God for perspective, experience and wisdom and for whatever calm comes with being out of the centrifugal force of midlife.

If we are determined to resist the admittedly depressing feeling of losing touch with life, there are many ways of still being involved. There are many children in this world who need our help and involvement. There are many ways to pass on our skills and wisdom. There are many ways to open up new worlds for ourselves, to rekindle our own enthusiasm and joie de vivre.

Having a baby and trying to create a life we might have had decades earlier is an idea that doesn’t bear inspection. I still wake up, years after the fact, and thank God devoutly each morning that I don’t have to scramble out of bed and organise the school run. The thought of being tied, on a daily basis, to the regime of a toddler makes me feel weak.

There are so many downsides to being out of kilter with the natural order. The teenage mother would be bouncing around in her thirties when her child hit adolescence and she would have reserves of energy and tolerance to draw on. I assume the teenager would have family backing. Ideally there would be active grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins.