Proportion of UK women with no children doubled in a generation
The proportion of women who never have children in the UK has doubled in a generation, Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) said.
The official figures show that of women born in 1946, just nine percent were still childless at 45 — the age the ONS defines as the end of childbearing years.
Statisticians said women were less likely to be married and more likely to be putting off having children until they could no longer have them, The Telegraph reported.
Of those born in 1971, 18 percent were childless in 2016, when they turned 45. Almost half of women who turned 30 in 2016 did not have any children, up from a low of just 18 per cent in 1976.
The data showed that while the two-child family remains the most common situation, the younger women were significantly likely to have no children or one child than their older counterparts.
Women were increasingly likely to postpone “decisions about whether to have children until it may be biologically too late”, the report said.
The change “may be due to a decline in the proportion of women married, changes in the perceived costs and benefits of child-rearing versus work and leisure activities, [and] greater social acceptability of a childfree lifestyle”, the ONS said.
Large families were also in decline, and the percentage of women having a two-child family had fallen by seven percent in 20 years.
It added: “While the two child family remains the most common family type in England and Wales, with 37 percent of women born in 1971 having two children, the prevalence is below the peak of 44 percent for the 1950 cohort.
“Families with no children or families with one child were the next most common for women born in 1971 at 18 percent each.
“Only one in 10 women born in 1971 had four or more children, compared with nearly one in five in the 1940 cohort.”
The ONS report tracks women born in each year to examine how many children they have and when.
It also found that women have become more likely in recent years to have had a child before they turn 30.
While the average age of childbearing has increased, women born in 1987 were slightly less likely to be childless at 30 than those born the year before.
The average family size for women turning 30 has also crept up, rising from a low of 0.98 children in 2007 to 1.03 children this year.
The report said: “Women from all cohorts between 1979 and 1986 have had higher fertility rates in their late 20s than those born in 1978.
“Possible reasons for this increase include the changes in support for families introduced by previous governments (such as tax credits and maternity and paternity leave) and the increasing proportion of women aged 25 to 29 years who were born outside the UK, with fertility above the UK born average.”
Separate figures released last year by the ONS showed that more than half of births in 2015 were to women aged 30 and over, while two thirds were to fathers of the same age group.