It’s been a grim year for baby-making. But what can the Christmas story teach us about having a child?

‘A child might still influence the times in which they live because one life is inextricably bound up with the lives of others.’ Composite: Nenov/Getty Images

I had no strong desire to be a mum. Now that I am one to two boys, I can’t imagine anything else. But I might increasingly be in the minority. Madeleine L’Engle captured the mood of those ruling out parenthood: “This is no time for a child to be born, with the earth betrayed by war and hate.”

So opens her poem The Risk of Birth, Christmas, 1973. Maybe that year made for especially grim baby-making but regardless of the carnage of 1973 – and any year, really – it’s an enduring dilemma, this becoming-a-parent thing. It’s never a good time to have a baby.