There's probably a lot of reasons you could think of for women in their thirties categorising a pregnancy as 'unplanned' - a broken condom, perhaps. An ill-timed dash to get the morning-after pill which involved missing a work meeting, or being unable to drop £25 picking it at a pharmacy. But is there a link between finding yourself with an unplanned pregnancy and using Tinder? Probably not: these are things that just sometimes happen regardless of your relationship status or dating choices.
But this is not the view of our Health Minister Jackie Doyle-Price who declared this week that a rise in unplanned pregnancy is due to a 'Tinder generation' of thirty-something women who are leaving relationships in order to 'play the field again'.
According to Doyle-Price, who spoke earlier this week, 'the growth area of unplanned pregnancies is not teenagers anymore - it's 30-somethings. We're laughing and talking about the Tinder generation now,' she explained, 'but what tends to happen is you have a woman leave one relationship and then play the field again - entering the market again. That's when the unplanned pregnancies tend to happen. I think there's an education point there, which is "please continue to look after your fertility".
There's a lot to unpack here: obviously taking care of your sexual health and ensuring you have appropriate access to contraception is crucial at any age (even though it is painful, time-consuming and if you've ever found yourself hunting down the morning after pill at the last minute: expensive). But given it's now 2019 why are we still putting the onus on women when it comes to an outcome of unplanned pregnancy?
After all, it takes more than one person for it to happen and, biologically speaking, one of them is usually a man. Furthermore, while Doyle-Price didn't give us any statistics to back up the link between Tinder and unplanned pregnancy, what she did do by making that conflation was low-key shame all women in their thirties who take the decision to 'play the field'. It goes without saying, but just FYI: to any MP's that think so it's a lack of contraception - not using dating apps which will get you pregnant.
Doyle-Price's comments have been linked to the well-documented rise in abortions among 30-something women (in 2017 the number of abortions among women over 35 was also the highest on record at 29, 471). But isn't that also entirely unsurprising? There are a whole host of reasons thirty-something women may be facing termination following an unplanned pregnancy more now than, say 20 years ago. Millennials – or 'generation rent', as they are also known – are subject to soaring rent prices and static salaries. The majority of us aren't going to be able to afford a house until approximately 2089 - none of which make for ideal conditions to raise a child. A 2016 study showed that couples in the UK spend around a third of their income on childcare. But in 2018 women's average salaries in their thirties were only £27,000 a year.
Even assuming that unplanned pregnancies mostly happen outside of stable relationships (spoiler alert: they don't), can we talk for a moment about how Jackie Doyle-Price's comments fail to address the men in their thirties who are 'playing the field'. What about their part in the rise in unplanned pregnancies?
Typically, the burden of responsibility for seeking contraception has been with women. Even though half of men stated they probably wouldn't take the male contraceptive pill because of 'side effects' (the same ones women have been putting up with for decades) there are still condoms, so at least part of the responsibility for contraception can be assumed by men.
Then there's 'stealthing' (sexually violating a partner by removing a condom during sex) as well as being labelled rape-adjacent it's also an offense that can cause unplanned pregnancy without the woman's consent or sometimes even her knowledge. A recent study showed 32% of women have experience it at least once, what about those women?
To link more unplanned pregnancies in women in their thirties to the 'Tinder generation' is to ignore all of the other endemic issues women face which can result in an unplanned pregnancy, but above all it's unhelpful because it tunes in with the narrative that women alone are to blame. Now more than ever we need MP's to be supporting women when it comes to an unplanned pregnancy, not tearing them down.