About 82 000 single thirty something women a year have a baby without a partner on the scene, almost double the number of a decade ago. And many of them wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The typical single women who come to us,” says specialist fertility nurse Helen Kendrew, “are the women who have had a career and have had everything sorted and now realize that they want to have a baby.

“In their twenties women tend to put careers first and imagine that husbands and families are going to fall into line at some point. They’ve got their whole life laid out before them, but when they get to their thirties and forties and it hasn’t quite worked out like that, it can be a hell of a shock.”

The women described by Kendrew are not the sinister band of Sadfabs – (”Single And Desperate For A Baby”), lambasted by the media: the forty something harridan with an empty womb, a mad glint in her eye and a narcissistic desire to add a baby to her “to-do list”.

On the contrary: overwhelmingly it seems that the women going it alone are a set of successful, financially independent individuals who, with a biological sell-by-date looming and in the absence of a long-term partner, have simply decided to try to conceive anyway.

In a recent YouGov Omnibus survey, two-thirds of the women surveyed agreed that it was OK for a financially secure single woman to deliberately set out to have a child by herself; however 66 percent of women also think that a father figure is necessary for a child’s well being.

“I think it’s every woman’s right to have a child, because that is what we are built to do and no one should judge us for the way we do it. In the next five years everyone will know a woman who has done what I have done. I have done the right thing – Ruth Yahel, 41, is a TV production

Research suggests that although single women accept that they may have to go the single parent route, it is not because of a dogged determination to exclude men, but rather because they haven’t found the right one in time.

“Women didn’t choose this,” insists Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4’s head of news and current affairs and the commissioner of the documentary, Baby Race: “I believe that women would prefer to have had the relationship with a man, but that didn’t work and this is why they’re pursuing other options.

“In the past, what most women would have done in this situation would have got into a relationship with entirely the wrong bloke in order to have a baby because there wasn’t anything you could do, whereas now there is something you can do. Instead of women being regretful, they’re deciding to do it on their own.”

Byrne’s argument suggests that in a society where women have become accustomed to the best of everything, the freedom to choose in their careers and relationships, they now expect the freedom to be able to take charge of their biology.

“These women have got the basic kit for getting pregnant,” she says. “The only thing missing is the sperm. So the issue is, how do they go about getting that?”

With primary care trusts such as Camden in London considering the introduction of free fertility treatment for single women, it means there are now far more options open to those who want a baby, but who haven’t found the right man for the job.

There are even new “Plan Ahead” fertility kits on sale which mean that for £180, women can predict how much time they have left to conceive.

The YouGov poll shows, however, that although for many the imperative to have a child takes priority over the desire to find a partner, a large proportion of women would ultimately like to find someone to share their children with.

Two-thirds of the single women surveyed said they just hadn’t found the right man, with nearly half believing they would be unhappy if they stayed single all their lives.

Echoing the infamous “I wanna” mantra, shouted from the roofs of double-decker buses by the thrusting, Technicolor, mini-skirt-clad Spice brigade, Dorothy Byrne says that what single women need to ask themselves is, what do I really want? She says: “I believe that if you ask the majority of women what would they like in life, they would say to be healthy, to have children and to meet the right man for me.”