Falling birth rates should be a man’s problem too
Ialways thought I’d have children. Growing up in a family of four, it was simply one of those assumptions I made, in the same way as I assumed my older sister would always be able to draw better than me (she can) and our pet cat would be around forever (he wasn’t).
But it hasn’t turned out like that. I’m now in my late-30s, divorced, single, and the pitter-patter of tiny feet is not to be heard in the hallway. Not least because I don’t have a hallway, and live in a flat in north London.
My professional life is on track. At around the same time I was busily assuming I’d have children, I also nurtured ambitions to be an author and journalist. I’ve managed that. The procreation has been trickier.
I’m not alone: a recently published international league table has found that a fifth of British women are childless in their early 40s – a figure exceeded only by Spain and Austria. The rate of childlessness among UK women is increasing sharply, and is up by almost 50 per cent since the mid-nineties.
What lies behind this trend? From my own experience, I think it comes down to two things. The first is that the men I’ve been in relationships with either haven’t been ready or willing to become fathers. That says a lot about the conspicuous failure of my own judgment, but it also speaks to a society that enables men to waft around attempting to find themselves and establish their careers through their 30s while women have to balance job progression with the ticking of a biological clock. (Oh, you didn’t realise women also want to spend time focusing on their career? Yeah. They do. It’s just they’ve had to do it at the same time as everything else.)
The second factor is that, at school, the minimal sex education I was subjected to was entirely focused on the terrors of accidental pregnancy. It was repeatedly drummed into us that contraception was absolutely necessary in order to avoid ruining our lives by allowing a feckless man to impregnate us before we were ready.
I spent much of my 20s
fervently avoiding pregnancy as if it were a communicable disease. I went on the pill at 19 and didn’t come off it for 14 years. No one told me that was a bad idea. No GP informed me of what it might mean for my fertility. I simply embraced the freedom that came with it.
I don’t know if being on the pill for that long contributed to my difficulties in getting pregnant, but I suspect it can’t have helped. After two years of fruitless trying, I had two cycles of (unsuccessful) IVF. Several months later, I got pregnant naturally, only to miscarry at three months. Since then, I’ve frozen my eggs in an attempt to take out some sort of insurance policy against the future, but most of the science tells us that that’s a process more likely to fail than succeed.
I still hope to be a mother one day, but I’m aware that it might not happen – at least not in a conventional, biological sense. It’s not because I’ve chosen this or because I’m the careerobsessed harpy of popular imagination; it’s simply the way things have happened.
It would be great if sex education at school could focus on the uncertainty of fertility as well as pregnancy prevention. Most importantly, boys should be taught this, too.