Dollymix poll: would you have a baby with your best friend as a last resort?

I had thought it was the stuff of fantasies and Friends reruns - having a baby with a male pal if you were still single at 35.

But writer Katy Regan did just that, as she writes in the Daily Mail:

"We'd had the drunken conversation: 'If I don't meet anyone by 35, will you have a baby with me?' But at 29, I thought I still had time to meet 'the one'. The trouble was, my attempts at dating other men were half-hearted. Louis may not have been Mr Right, but I couldn't quite pull myself away."

Katy and Louis were both single and had got into the habit of ending up in bed together, even when there had never really been much chemistry between them. But, when Katy fell pregnant, everything changed.

"Over the next few disorienting weeks [...] the reality of what it meant to be having the baby of someone I wasn't 'with' washed over me in frightening waves - I would never know what it was like to have my first child with someone I was in love with; nobody else would want me once I had a baby."

Despite everything, though, the arrangement seems to have worked for Katy. Although she moved in with Louis during her pregnancy, their relationship has remained platonic, and now they have a four-year-old, Fergus:

"Many of my 30-something friends envy the fact that I have a child, no matter how he came about. I have a fantastic relationship with his father; my son spends more time with his dad than many of the children of married men I know, and when I watch Louis making birthday invitations with Fergus, I think how lucky I am that the man I did not choose as my husband or as the father of my child has turned out to be the most amazing dad."

I can see the upside of this - there's a statistic somewhere that a woman over 30 is more likely to, well, do something really unlikely than to marry.

In many instances, close friendships are taking over the support roles that families traditionally provided. Long-term friends would have proved themselves in the loyalty department, so if you're single and they're single - why not?

But what happens if you meet someone later? Or if they do? What happens if either of you starts a new family with someone else? How would that impact on the child? And male/female friendships can get complicated at the best of times - what if, through all the close contact and shared experiences, one of you falls for the other?

Even Katy Regan got a bit confused:

"I found it hard to separate emotionally from Louis, since he was so close physically and I genuinely enjoy his company. I've been on so many dates, but rarely got past a second meeting. Either the men were put off by the fact that I have a child or there was just no spark between us. Louis has had more success on the relationship front, but women have confessed that they find our closeness off-putting."

We've written before about pregnancy pacts, and obviously Katy did not plan to have a child with Louis. But, if you wanted a child badly enough, and you had a good friend you could envisage sleeping with without wincing, would you?

Or would you give up and buy a creepy "newborn" doll instead?

Image courtesy of meuredecine's Flickr stream.

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