As she drapes herself seductively across the West End bar surrounded by a group of girlfriends, Jessica Barker is a woman on a mission. A City headhunter by trade, she is recruiting a man for a very different sort of job — although he might not find out that he has passed the interview for another nine months.

At 37, Barker is desperate for a baby. “In my twenties I sized up men on the basis of their looks or whether they were a good laugh,” said Oxford-educated Barker, who lives in west London. “In my early thirties, I looked for good career prospects and a desire to settle down. Now I look at men as potential fathers for my child — are they healthy, tall enough and intelligent? I’d love to find someone with whom I could have a relationship, but mainly I want a baby and I can’t afford to wait around.”

Being single after a five-year relationship recently hit the rocks, Barker is actively considering getting pregnant, perhaps through a one-night stand, and bringing up a child by herself. So, she says, are a number of her friends — and they’re hunting in packs.

If everything goes to plan she will follow in the footsteps of Geri Halliwell, the former Spice Girl who last month gave birth to a daughter, Bluebell Madonna, conceived during a six-week fling with the screenwriter Sacha Gervasi.

Early on in the pregnancy Halliwell fell out with Gervasi — apparently when he questioned whether the hasty conception had been an accident. The hapless 40-year-old was then reportedly reduced to hanging around London’s exclusive Portland hospital hoping to catch a glimpse of his baby, having found himself superfluous to Halliwell’s requirements.

Women such as Barker and Halliwell are behind the rise of what what might be dubbed the “Ginger Spice family”: a neat, one mother, one child non-nuclear unit. Stridently independent and monied, these are women who are no longer prepared to sit dolefully on a shelf as their fertility runs out.

To paraphrase the Spice Girls song, they know what they really, really want — and they want it now. The pages of celebrity magazines are full of them — Kate Moss and Liz Hurley are perhaps the most prominent examples.

According to Lucy Beresford, a psychotherapist at the Priory hospital in Roehampton, southwest London, more and more women are resorting to sometimes dubious tactics to achieve motherhood.

“You could call them ‘sperm catchers’,” she said. “This is being driven by career women in their mid-to-late thirties who find that having a baby is rising to the top of their ‘to do’ list. It is happening increasingly. If they haven’t a partner, they’ve got the basic kit and they decide to go it alone.”

ABOUT 82,000 single thirtysomething women a year now have a baby without a partner on the scene, almost double the number of a decade ago.

Now that it’s a fashionable option, the subject of how best to achieve single motherdom is the subject of much female debate. “Sperm donation is messy and legally fraught,” said a 34-year-old advertising executive who is privy to such discussions. “They’ve changed the law so that the donor can potentially come back to haunt you. Adoption takes for ever. The old-fashioned option — a one-night stand, is the least complicated way of getting pregnant. It’s quick, you get to view a prototype and it’s free.”

There are also shades of grey — the “pregnant after first date” women who play Russian roulette with possibly unsuitable partners on the basis that if it works out, fine; if they end up single with a baby, at least they end up with something.

Others simply ask male friends for a sample of their sperm. Ruth Yahel, 41, a television production executive from north London, knew that time was running out for her to have a baby, because previous endometriosis had led to a blocked fallopian tube. In early 2005 she had IVF using the sperm of her gay best friend, Nico Vittiglio, who lives in Italy. She now has a son, Luca, aged seven months.

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