Why can't a woman like me say she doesn't want children without getting called a "media whore" in need of a "personality transplant"?

I felt the pressure everywhere - in magazines, on TV, among friends, during a Sunday roast at my mother’s. Was I aware my fertility was in decline? What would I do?

(Getty)

Outspoken journalist Holly Brockwell, 29, was probably looking forward to seeing her opinion piece – ‘Desperate not to have children’ - go live as part of the BBC’s auspicious ‘100 Women 2015’ series.

In the wake of its consequences, however, she’s probably wishing she’d stayed home and baked scones instead.

For Holly had unwittingly written something so invidious to an invisible sea of online critics that within hours of it being published she was forced to de-active her Twitter account. As a slew of sinister insults descended, she was shadowed by a security guard when she visited the BBC to take part in an interview. She was repeatedly called “selfish” and a “media whore” in need of a “personality transplant” by tweeters enraged by the idea that she didn’t want children, and had asked doctors to tie her tubes as a permanent form of contraception.

From the moment she admitted that in public, she was Twitter road-kill.

The hounding of Holly is horrific but although her trial by social media is shocking, it’s nothing new. Throughout history, motherhood has been sanctified as a woman’s truest purpose – and men in particular have been enthusiastic about ensuring women know that. Sex object comes a close second to the primary function of maternity, of course. And those of us who don’t or won’t have children are regarded as neurotic, unnatural and dangerously rebellious.

Yet far more insidious is the steady drip-feed of socially acceptable sexism that eats away at even the strongest woman’s esteem.

What is wrong with us non-conformists? What is the point of our empty wombs? Can’t we just get pregnant?

If like me, you’re over 40, childless and single, you might as well move to a hut in Peru, tend goats, and be done with trying to fit into polite society.

I can laugh about it now. But it wasn’t always so. My thirties were a ghastly decade in which the sound of the biological clock grew ever painfully louder. I felt the pressure everywhere - in magazines, on TV, among friends, during a Sunday roast at my mother’s. Was I aware my fertility was in decline? What would I do?

But I was stuck. I wasn’t prepared to have a family with someone I didn’t love, or trick a solvent would-be sperm donor. Besides, who but the wealthy can really afford to have children?

I increasingly found myself lost in a society that wouldn’t acknowledge my existence. Ten years ago there were virtually no female role models for women like me. Though our numbers were steadily rising, with one in four university-educated women childless, we remained invisible to popular culture.

It’s only in more recent years that glorious role models like Lena Dunham, historian Lucy Worsley, Kim Cattrall and Miranda Hart - all childless - have broken the mould and refused to be typecast as spinsters who are tragically missing out on traditional family life.

Stigmatising childless women doesn’t help anyone. It divides us all and ultimately reduces everyone’s value to their reproductive organs.

It’s also pretty reckless on a planet which is hugely over-populated, in an environment in which teenage girls and young women are plagued by insecurities about what it means to be a female.

They don’t stand a chance when they’re constantly fed a diet of Kardashians and Beckhams, rich and broody, with babies who make stunning accessories.

This Christmas, I challenge other single, childless women to celebrate their freedom and the many meaningful connections they have in their lives. It is possible to have a rewarding life without bowing to convention.

And let’s all salute the courage of Holly Brockwell, who should not be forced take the fall for a society which is still struggling to come to terms with female emancipation.