Like many others, I watched with dismay as the landmark Roe v Wade ruling was overturned in the USA last week, allowing individual states the right to ban women from having access to abortions. I have many friends in the States and they were equally appalled. Unfortunately the country, like several others including the UK, is in the grip of conservative, older, white men who no doubt believe everything was better in the 1950s, when women ‘knew their place’ (and were kept quiet with Valium).

In a place where women are not guaranteed paid maternity leave or any financial support raising a child, this insistence on the rights of the unborn foetus are curious indeed. It will almost certainly lead to a rise in infanticide; in botched abortions possibly resulting in brain damage in the infant and/or posing serious health risks for the woman. There will be mothers who are incapable of looking after either themselves or the offspring, and a host of children abandoned on church doorsteps and the like, who will have to be looked after by the state. How is this caring for the rights of the child, O Great White Male…?

It might be assumed that as I founded Mothers Uncovered, a creative peer support network for women to share experiences of motherhood, that I’m a sort of Earth Mother figure, believing that there is no greater destiny for a woman than to procreate. I do think motherhood is an immensely important role and it is not adequately recognised either financially, or in terms of respect. It’s one of the reasons why I champion the word matrescence to describe the process of becoming a mother, as it is more all-encompassing than the diagnostic terminology of maternity, post natal depression and so on, which reduces women to a label. Interestingly, the word matrescence was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973, the same year as the Roe V Wade case.

However, a mother is more than the sum of her parts. One of our taglines is ‘behind every mother is the woman she has always been.’ Our groups aim to reconnect the mother with that pre-motherhood self, to remind her that she still exists. Twitter got itself in a frenzied lather the other day because of an Opinion piece in The Metro from a woman who objected to being called ‘Mum’ by anyone except her children. The usual pitchforks were out, decrying her as moaning, ridiculous and the biggie, ‘ungrateful’ for being a mother.

In all the Mothers Uncovered groups I’ve ever run, I’ve never yet met a mother who was unaware of how lucky she was to have that role. Because they face judgement, many women repeatedly deny any of their own needs until they are often in a desperate state. Yes, they have the immense gift of that baby, but to suggest that they should have no further sadness, anger or boredom in their lives, just because they are mothers, is preposterous.

I heard Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour interviewing a woman in the States who was trying to argue that the overturning of the Roe v Wade case wasn’t so bad really, she said women could always travel to a Planned Parenthood clinic in another area. She would not be deterred from her belief that this would not always be feasible for some women, due to lack of funds or transport. But to break this down into practicalities is to miss the wood for the trees. This is nothing at all to do with mothers or children. It is about controlling women, denying them choice or agency in their lives. Sadly, Atwood’s Gilead seems ever more uncomfortably closer.