Women are accused of many things when they don’t have children – or rather, when they don’t have them early or often enough, with being too focused on their careers the most common one levelled at them.
Now, however, our drinking habits are being held up as a possible explanation behind the West’s plummeting birth rate. Poland’s leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said this week that young women drinking too much is partly to blame for his country’s low birth rate. Kaczynski has said that if women drink too much up to the age of 25 then, ‘it’s not a good prognosis in these matters.’ He went on to say: ‘And here it is sometimes necessary to say a little openly, some bitter things. If, for example, the situation remains such that, until the age of 25, girls, young women, drink the same amount as their peers, there will be no children.’
The 73-year-old added: ‘I am really a sincere supporter of women's equality, but I am not a supporter of women pretending to be men.’
Unsurprisingly his critics were quick to point out that, rather than women drinking, the country’s restrictions to abortion access may have discouraged women from having children, along with difficulty in affording it, given that inflation in Poland is now at nearly 18%.
And it’s a similar story over here. A recent headline that claimed Women ARE choosing over having children, was actually about a study from University College London, where the study’s author Professor Joyce Harper said of her research: ‘It’s not necessarily that they want to reach the top of the ladder or are ambitious. Instead, many are nervous because they feel their career will suffer after returning to work after having a baby.’ Another recent headline claimed a Conservative minister said women (note: not couples) should ‘bonk for Britain’ in order to ‘get tax cuts for having children’ to encourage a baby boom.
‘There seems to be a huge knowledge gap amongst policy makers and many journalists about the specific challenges that half the population experience,’ says Joeli Brearley, founder of Pregnant Then Screwed. ‘We aren’t thoughtfully sidelining children for our careers, and we don’t need tax cuts so that we will “bonk for Britain”. What we need is a system that actually works for mothers so we don’t get plunged into poverty when we do have kids, so that we don’t get shoved out of our job for daring to procreate, so that we have a childcare system that means we are not paying to go to work.’
The UK’s birth rate is sinking to an all time low, with fewer babies born in 2021 than during the 1930s depression. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), women born in 1975 had on average just 1.92 children, compared with the average 2.08 children their mother’s generation had – a decline that looks set to continue.
But rather than roll out old tropes about ‘career women’, or blaming our drinking habits, surely the reasons are far clearer: we know that having children often comes with a ‘motherhood penalty’, the cost of living is soaring, and all the while the UK has the second most expensive childcare in the world.
‘It’s pretty basic stuff,’ says Joeli. ‘And we have been shouting, repeatedly, about what we need, but instead of actually listening and putting forward a credible plan that works for women, it is insinuated that we are lazy and feckless, or just really interested in our careers. And then they wonder why population growth has gone into reverse.
‘The whole thing makes me want to stick pens in my eyes. This Government chooses to rearrange the deckchairs whilst the ship sinks and the whole time the answer – which is for them to invest in a good quality childcare system – is staring them in the face.’