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Everywhere I seem to look, there are pregnant women. Women of all ages, in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Skinny ones and large ones and, since I live in Paris, mainly very chic ones.
At my Pilates class, there are fit, pregnant women. In Café des Amis, my local bistro, there are two older mothers-to-be drinking Perrier and eating salade Parisienne.
And at Body Minute, those rather strange Paris institutions where people wander off the street to get waxes or pedicures, I sat for no more than 45 minutes last week and counted three bumps of various sizes that came through the door.
We live in a time of rapidly increasing pregnancy rates. So how I laughed at an angry, rather bitter little book witten by French economist/psychoanalyst Corinne Maier entitled, No Kid: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children.
Maier became famous three years ago for another funny, angry little book called Bonjour Panesse (Hello Laziness), which sold 550,000 copies and had her hailed as an icon. One critic described it as "a call for middle managers to rise up and throw out their laptops". This one is a call to maintain your freedom and to opt out of having children.
Like Faith Popcorn, that oddly named New Yorker in the Eighties who was always predicting trends five years ahead of time, Maier seems to have that uncanny ability to put her finger exactly on what people are thinking, at the right time and in the right place. Right now, it's motherhood.
But it's a touchy, awkward subject. It's as close to a taboo as you can get: admitting that you don't want children and that if you have them, perhaps life would have been better if you did not. It's the kind of thing you might say to your shrink, but not something you blurt out at a polite dinner party.
Maier claims she wrote her book half as a provocation and half as a genuine thesis addressing questions that people ask themselves. Part of it comes from growing up in a culture where we are surrounded with images of Madonna-like pregnant women and where children, though heavily disciplined, have a crucial role in society.
"In France, people go on too much about the glory of motherhood," Maier has said. "I thought it would be fun to take a dig at the myth that having children is wonderful."
Her French publisher, Editions Michalon, plans on making a fortune out of this book. It sent it out with an odd press release: "What are you doing this summer? Going on vacation, plan on having a bit of fun? Tropical ambiance, no clothes, dirty dancing? Sounds fun? Be careful, danger lurks! No we are not talking about Aids or Ebola but pregnancy; accidents happen so fast."
It's a rather odd way of promoting a book, and it's also rather odd that it has been written by a French woman. France has the highest fecundity rate in Europe, 830,000 births in 2006, the average of 2.9 children per woman.
It even surpasses Ireland. Part of the reason is religion and tradition but also the fat subsidies the state hands out to pregnant women, babies, new mothers, and families. It's one of the few places I know where young girls start talking about having a "bébé" in their early twenties and where reproduction, rather than a career, is viewed as a viable option after leaving university.
This is the only country in the world, as far as I'm aware, where a state-paid helper arrives a week after you give birth to make you carrot soup and help arrange your layette. It is the only country I know of that pays for a physical therapist to work with you to get your stomach muscles (and your reproductive muscles, but that's another matter) strong again, so that you look good in a bikini a few months after giving birth (and reproduce swiftly again).
It is also the only country that gives you a 50 per cent tax break on your nanny and awards huge discounts on rail travel if you have a child. Of course the French state is bankrupt on the back of this, but never mind.
Maier complains about all the things that most people with children feel but would never say: the loss of those wonderful lazy weekends, lounging in bed and drinking coffee on Sunday mornings; the vast expense of having a child; the overwhelming sense of responsibility for the next two decades.
She hates McDonald's, Disneyland and the Disney Channel.
But most of all, she hates the way that people's lives are curtailed and thwarted when they have children. If people did not have them, she retorts, "they'd think about what they really want and just go out and do it".
And apparently, while Maier is in the minority, it's a trend that is growing. Last month, the newspaper Le Parisian said that 10 per cent of French women do not want to have children. Another book was published in France in January called Being a Woman Without Being a Mother.
It might be acceptable to write that book in New York, where women have always put career ahead of family, but not in France.
To me, Maier's book was humorous even if I could not relate to it. I had my son late in life, so his birth and his presence is a joy rather than an imposition. I had enough Saturday mornings lounging around drinking coffee to know it gets boring. I don't mind the fact that my son wears upmarket Bonpoint while I can't afford to go within 20 feet of Prada any more. I am thrilled that he takes up all my time. The way I see it, he has saved me from being a selfish egomaniac.
But Maier had her children younger - she is now 43 and has a 13-year-old daughter and a son aged 10. She resents taking them to children's parties when she would rather be at a museum; she resents the fact that she and her psychiatrist partner don't have sex as much as they used to; she even resents the pain and agony of childbirth (which for me was a big laugh as I was so stoned on my epidural).
But, while I felt for her two children when I read the book - wondering what the hell they are going to think when they are old enough to read it, and thank God their father is a psychiatrist - I do see the sense in some of her points. I do think society puts tremendous pressure on women to reproduce.
It happened to me, and it happens to my many friends who don't have children. Not just at drinks parties ("Do you have kids? Oh really? Why not?") but from family, colleagues and doctors (I changed doctors twice because, in my early thirties, I kept being hounded by mine to "get on with it and have a baby" when I really was not emotionally ready).
There is an unnecessary stigma attached to remaining childless. I once read a quote from a General saying a soldier who had not killed in battle was akin to a woman who had never given birth. And Maier is sensitive to this. She points out that any dissident, any woman who actually does not want a child, is viewed as neurotic, obsessed by her career or a lesbian.
At times, she is funny - railing against the Disney channel and those awful messages people leave on their answerphones with their toddler saying "leave a message after the beep!" - but at times she is just hard. As for her own history, she says she loves her children but sometimes bitterly regrets having them.
The moral of the story is that Corinne Maier is desperately French. Her first book was all about how to milk the generous welfare state, and take as much as you can while working as little as you can. Her second is little more than a chance to complain. After all, ''Il faut raler'' - you've got to complain - is the national anthem here.
British readers would be well advised to read this book, enjoy it, then throw it in the bin.
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