WHY HAS society become obsessed with conception and motherhood? It could not be mere coincidence that in one week we have seen the destruction of 5,000 frozen embryos, learned of octuplet mother Mandy Allwood's appalling predicament, and discovered that a woman pregnant with twins had one of them selectively aborted because she could not cope.

The offer of money to the twins' mother from anti abortion organisations came too late. But it was not long before more parents of twin foetuses, and even of triplets, started coming forward to claim that unless someone gave them money, they too would choose selective abortion.

Meanwhile, we have watched the US Republican convention turn into a heartfelt anti abortion rally, with female delegates cuddling their cherished babies on the floor. And during it all we've seen pictures of a pregnant Madonna spread across the tabloids, as if pregnancy itself was some kind of freak occurrence.

Our society is in a crisis over motherhood. We are uncertain what motherhood is. We don't know who should he allowed to be a mother.

Should she have a partner? Should she be under 50 years of age? We don't even know whether a mother of humans needs to be human.

The Japanese learned during the week, are close to developing an artificial womb (too late for the 5,000 rejected frozen embryos) which could nurture human life created in a lab dish with an egg and sperm from two people who do not even know each other.

The fertility treatments which were once touted as miracles now seem a Pandora's Box of moral nightmares. And the tragedy is that all these issues have been waiting for years in the ethical freezer, like those 5,000 frozen embryos, for us to deal with them.

Were they 5,000 frozen bits of useless human tissue or 5,000 souls? This week we realised that we still have not really begun to grasp it.

THERE is an unsettling sense, for many people, that nature never meant us to have such options. The octuplet freak show has threatened to create a backlash against all fertility treatment, full stop.

Already British broadsheets are publishing thoughtful articles by infertile women who decided that childlessness was preferable to the high emotional cost of the fertility treatment treadmill.

Years ago the development of fertility treatment for infertile couples seemed a true Godsend. We were all gratified by the happiness of once infertile women.

But there in the realms of perfect motherhood the story was supposed to rest. We did not expect to see fertility enhancing hormones handed out like Smarties. And we didn't foresee the version of motherhood we now see in Mandy Allwood.

Yet not to have imagined such outcomes was the result of our naivety at best and our collective sense of denial at worst.

Throughout the past decade of progress in fertility treatment we have irresponsibly passed the buck to the medical profession to make these ethical choices for us paternalistically. Meanwhile they have turned fertility treatment into a big and very competitive business.

These business interests in co operation with their consumers - which is what some of these mothers have become - have been deciding what a mother, in the broadest sense of the word, should be.

Should she be married? Should she be emotionally stable? How many years can her motherhood extend? Past menopause? Can she be convinced that twins or triplets are preferable to childlessness? Can she be convinced that to become pregnant with multiple foetuses, with the option of selective abortion, is morally sustainable and emotionally survivable?

Fertility treatment has increased the incidence of twins in the UK from one in 100 births to one in 75. Yet caring for twins is so difficult that bearing twins doubles the risk of postnatal depression for the mother.

We are creating many more mothers of twins without giving them the support they need, making selective abortion inevitable in some cases. A mother, by this definition, is a creature who can love one of the babies in her womb while rejecting the other.

And what choice does she really have - in a society in which mothers are expected to get on with mothering without being nurtured themselves, emotionally or financially? More women, such as the twins' mother, are refusing to martyr themselves, and society is having a hard time dealing with that.

BUT when we don't support mothers and insist on seeing them as self sufficient icons rather than as social creatures who need caring social networks, what can we expect?

Just so that readers knew what a horror selective abortion really was, the Daily Express last week raised consciousness by quoting the father of unborn septuplets who had witnessed the selective abortion of six of them.

"I watched on the ultrasound as potassium was injected into their tiny beating hearts," he said.

Science and the medical profession created those tiny beating hearts in Mandy Allwood's womb and in the wombs of others by prescribing a hormone which allowed her to produce so many eggs at once that multiple pregnancy was guaranteed should she have sexual intercourse.

Some commentators have criticised the medical profession for allowing this to happen. But the profession obviously cannot control itself completely, or what happened to Mandy Allwood would not have occurred.

She was treated with HMG (human menopausal gonadotrophin), a hormone so strong and so likely to cause the ripening of multiple eggs that most doctors now refuse to use it unless they are experts with ultrasound scanning and virtually instant hormone testing at their disposal.

HMG is used in the Republic. As one Irish gynaecologist who watched the Allwood case unfold confided, "There's a feeling among us all that there but for the grace of God".

In other words, such situations are happening to mothers all the time, although we may not always hear about them. There but for the grace of God go all of us. And we still haven't a clue how to handle it.

It may be that Japan's artificial womb will be up and running with a human baby inside it (exposed no doubt in a picture spread by a British tabloid) before we decide how we feel about allowing a machine to be a mother.