We Aren’t Leaving It Too Late To Have Children, We’re Being Screwed Over

I’m 36 and I still leave it too late to do many things. I get out of the bath 10 minutes after I should have. I worry about how I’m going to get to the airport as I leave my flat. I start thinking about booking a dentist’s appointment when I’m long overdue. I do all of this knowingly, in the firm belief that most stress is optional and everything gets done in the end. 

But I’ll tell you what I haven’t deliberately left too late because of this particular personal philosophy: having children. 

There is currently a global panic about falling birth rates, and women like me, and perhaps you, are being blamed.

According to the latest official figures, Britain’s birth rate is at its lowest since 2002. This is a global trend. Twenty-three nations, including Spain, Japan and Thailand, are expected to see their populations halve by 2100. This is partly because of rising infertility rates among men (nobody’s talking about that, are they?) and partly because people are having fewer children and having them later in life. 

In Britain, the average age at which women have their first child is now 31. That’s a record high. In the mid-1970s it was 26.4. In the US, it’s rising too. The average age at which women there have their first child is now 27 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s also a record high. 

This week the panic has been stoked once again by a new report from Britain’s IVF regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which has revealed that the average age of people starting IVF treatment has passed 35 for the first time.

Predictably, this has sparked a flurry of headlines which either ask whether women are “leaving it too late?” or simply cut right to it and condemn them for “waiting too long”.

These words echo something that the former Conservative MP Danny Kruger said at last year’s National Conservatism Conference when he said he wanted to end “the narcissism of the ‘me’ generation” and see a “return to family values”. Or another former Conservative MP, Miriam Cates, who similarly blamed Britain’s falling birth rate on “liberal individualism”. 

These attempts to diagnose the cause of delayed motherhood completely miss the point. There are many reasons why women are having children later but none of them has anything to do with their obsession with themselves. Quite the opposite. Everyone I speak to who has yet to have children or is worried about having them is unsure whether they have the resources to support them. 

This is about economics, not narcissism. Across the world, there is a problem with the cost of housing. From America to Britain, from the Netherlands to India, homes are more expensive than they have ever been, whether that’s to buy or to rent.

In Britain, private rents are rising faster than inflation and house prices remain at historic highs. As I’ve written with the help of the Women’s Budget Group, an independent think tank which campaigns for a more equal economy, this means that there is now not one area in England which could be considered affordable for a single woman to rent or buy a home. My generation and the generation below are categorically worse off than our parents were at baby-producing age. Not only are our housing costs higher, our incomes are lower on average and we’re more likely to have student debt. Those who do own homes of their own are likely to have had help from wealthy family members. 

On top of that, while British women wait for changes to childcare provision to kick in, the fact remains that recent statistics from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) show that the UK has some of the most expensive childcare costs in the world, behind only the US, Ireland and New Zealand.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Young adult women today are more likely to have gone to university and be in work than previous generations. This is something to celebrate. It means we’ve lived independent lives before embarking on parenthood. But it also means that those of us who think we might want to have children one day have been busy, trying to earn enough to set ourselves up for it. 

You could and, indeed, I would argue that the problem is less that women are “leaving it too late” to start families and more that in many countries, governments have failed to provide the resources that make it possible to have a family. We need affordable childcare and housing. 

In Britain, having more than one child is becoming something of a status symbol. You need a big enough house and the money to pay for everyone. The pernicious two-child benefit cap remains in place even after the election of Britain’s new Labour government, actively shaming and penalising low-income families who have three children or more. If that isn’t a class divide, I don’t know what is. 

If you are a woman or a person with a uterus, you will have been confronting your fertility from a young age. From the moment you started menstruating you will have thought about what your body is capable of and grappled with that power — whether to use it and who to use it with. You will have worried about what having a child at the wrong moment could mean.

The HFEA’s report makes it clear that women risk lower success rates if they start IVF later on. And there is no way around the fact that everyone’s fertility declines with age, including men’s. But instead of laying this all at the door of women, it’s time to open up the conversation. The reasons why people are delaying parenthood are socioeconomic and the state should step in and support those who want to have children. 

In some countries, like Hungary, this looks like restricting abortion and introducing pronatalist policies which include giving families free people carriers and making women who have more than four children exempt from tax for life. But this isn’t about turning women into baby-making machines to further nationalist agendas; it’s about giving people proper choices instead of blaming and shaming women for something that isn’t their fault.

In 1997, when Labour last won a general election with a landslide in Britain, the birth rate was falling. What did they do? They set up Sure Start centres, child tax credits and free nursery education. They improved schools. 

Sir Keir Starmer’s government is talking about similar things. They want to bring in free breakfast clubs for every school. This would help working parents. And they will enact the Conservatives’ proposed expansion of childcare. But it doesn’t go far enough. 

The conversation needs to include men and people of any gender who want to start a family. There needs to be an awareness of the fact that everyone’s fertility declines with age, not just women’s. Childcare needs to be seen as infrastructure and so does affordable housing. When it is, maybe people will feel safe enough to have children. But until that happens, who would blame them if they don’t?