Well mop me down with a wet wipe: fewer women are having babies before they turn thirty. Who could possibly have guessed it?! Impossible to imagine! Except, well, for anyone who has walked through a supermarket, slid through a dating site, sat through the news or listened on a bus in the last ten years.
The latest release from the Office for National Statistics on Childbearing for women born in different years, England and Wales: 2020 finally lays out in graphic form what so many millions of us already knew to be true: that women are having fewer children and having those children later in life. In fact, half of women born in 1990 - possibly to the strains of Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice or Madonna’s Vogue - remained child free by their 30th birthday.
I say women because that’s the word right there in the title of the report. It is in women’s laps that this discussion so often sits, like an unfrozen, room-temperature bag of peas, dripping its condensation unpleasantly down our thighs. Women’s bodies are the national resource we are monitoring.
Whatever is making women hold out, it’s making men hold out for an average of 36 months longer.
But, if I may be so bold, this is not just a women’s issue. The average age of the first-time father in the UK is still three years older than that of a mother; 33.3 years old compared to 30.3 years old. Whatever is making women hold out, it’s making men hold out for an average of 36 months longer.
Like many cis-gendered, heterosexual women, I’ve been aware of this trend for a while. We’ve felt it in the pointed looks over birthday candles and tasted it in the thick-spitted questions of older relatives at weddings. We have seen it in our bank balances and etched across our skin. The more interesting question to me isn’t just how many women are turning thirty without children but why?
I turned 30 without a baby. Thick in the midst of what I call The Panic Years, I entered my third decade child-free, in a rented flat near a water treatment works. I was single, had recently been made redundant and couldn’t drive. I was living in an unaffordable city, working in an industry that seemed squeaky-arsed at its future prospects, saddled with student debt, with a dark but undeniable knowledge that the natural world was being irrevocably destroyed.
The men around me were, to a great extent, furiously living like twentysomethings for as long as humanly possible. Measuring out their lives in coffee shops and beer appreciation tweets, new trainers and endless discussions of American television, international sports, crunchy electronic music, start up food businesses (delete as appropriate). None of them talked about fatherhood. Ever.
When and whether women have children is a personal matter that speaks of greater forces at play.
The prospect of getting pregnant seemed, at that moment, about as likely as a jack-knife turn into a career as a marine biologist. Or the discovery that I was actually Venezuelan. Or the chances of competing in the winter Olympics. Several factors had coalesced to make the forecast unlikely: global financial insecurity, poor dating prospects, unstable and unaffordable housing, short-term work contracts (or no contracts at all), the cost of living, fear for the planet’s future and an awareness - however fuzzy - that pregnant people still faced significant discrimination. Just a quick look at the work of Pregnant Then Screwed makes clear that the idea we have achieved a kind of post-feminist maternal equality is a cold sack of lies. We haven’t even begun to fix something as obvious and universal as childcare.
I also knew that being child-free could be - for millions of people was - an active, conscious and positive choice. Of that 50% of women today who have not had a baby, a significant proportion will have done so intentionally. They will be on contraception to make it so. So, when I read a statistic like ‘of women aged 45 years and born in 1975 who had completed their childbearing years in 2020, 18% were childless,’ I am not filled with horror. Or pity.
Strangely, it makes me think back to a trip to go beachcombing, aged 13, wearing a pale pink pair of Pepe jeans, only to look down and realise that my gusset was stained the colour of rust. I have been ‘of childbearing age’ for about 25 years, in the sense that since I started my period I have probably been able to bear children.
But I didn’t. Not until I was 33; and had met someone I loved, had started to take my professional life seriously, had built up a good network of friends and invested time in my family. I had been to therapy, had confronted the very real possibility that I might never have children and had learned to bear uncertainty. I was more resilient, even in my panic.
When and whether women have children is a personal matter that speaks of greater forces at play. Instead of burrowing our attention in the soft abdomens of unsuspecting women, let’s start looking up and out at the things that we actually need to fix.
Polly Vernon: 'We Need To Stop Grilling Women About Whether They Have Children Or Not'