It is an incontrovertible fact that a 20-year-old body can cope with prolonged labour and delivery through the birth canal in a way that a body almost two decades older cannot.

Your argument about Down’s Syndrome and the average age is completely fallacious and dangerous misinformation. Average and incidence are not the same thing. Average age is dragged down when a few babies with Down’s Syndrome are born to women in their 20s. But the fact remains that most are born to women of 40+.

And in any case, I wasn’t talking about Down’s Syndrome, but about dangers like post-natal thrombosis, which can kill.

It is extremely risky to have a baby when you are over 40. It has nothing to do with fashion, Labour or social class. Biology does not change even though medicine moves forward. In medical terms, all women who give birth for the first time at 35 or older are high risk, and at 40 the risks go through the roof, especially for the baby.

That’s just the medical aspect. All I can say to Ms Dalli is ‘Good luck with dealing with teenage boys in your late 50s’. I was 20 years younger than that and it wiped me out.

You are talking like a labour woman here. Where they think one should get married at 20 and by 40 you are a nanna. God forbid anything else.

And thank goodness for your memory. It is mostly people’s severely impaired memories and their inability to recognise liars which got us to the state we are in.

Or plain crazy.

“Concerned”