Don’t blame older mothers, men aren’t ready either
Whenever I hear of a woman who has had her first child at or over 40 I always nod with deep approval. Feminism has gone down a number of blind alleys in recent decades, but the campaign to win women the freedom to render biology subservient to higher-order considerations, such as readiness, is one of its great triumphs. I see women who start families at 40 as taking advantage of a hard-won, slow-to-arrive freedom.
Many people don’t see it like this. Much of the world, including many men, are made uneasy by women straying too far from the ideal of the fertile young mother who gives herself over to her biological destiny as God intended. I’ve attracted venom on many occasions for suggesting women should control biology, not the other way round. I wrote about the egg-freezing industry recently, and all the angry comments came from men accusing me of being a realitydenier, feminazi and so on. Why do some men feel so threatened by women loosening the reproductive yolk, the harness of social expectation, and taking a gamble on starting a family later? Something tells me it’s not just altruistic concern for the species’ ability to propagate.
But whether they like it or not, the world is changing. Statistics show women are having babies later or, increasingly, not at all. The latest figures from the ONS last week showed that there were 640,370 babies born in England and Wales last year, 2.5 per cent less than in 2018 and 12 per cent less than 2012. The birth rate fell to 1.65 children per woman in 2019, from a peak in 1964 of 2.93.
Despite the panicky figures, it’s clear British women are still having babies; an average of nearly two per woman seems a lot, given the realities of modern lifestyles and expectations. Anecdotally, many of my friends have three children; only one has stopped at one.
But the most interesting figures concern age: rates of babies born to women under 30 have fallen to the lowest since records began in 1938. Indeed, women of all ages were less likely to have babies except women in their 40s: for the fifth year in a row, fertility rates were lower among women under 20 than over 40. This is huge.
The birth rate required for the nation to replace itself in size in the long term is 2.08 children per woman. We are currently falling below that, and so I can see why this makes some concerned. But the urge to blame women for waiting to have children until they are ready – can afford it; feel like it; have established themselves; have met the right person – is unfair and regressive.
In the first place, working and mothering at the same time is hard. It used to be harder, when fathers rarely lifted a finger. But if it took an exceptional woman, one willing to persevere through outrageous sexist obstacles to forge a successful professional career in pre-Eighties Britain, high career expectations are now the norm for women, especially those who have been to university (57 per cent of all university places are held by women in the UK). Women want more than a meaningless office job until marriage and babies, and housewifery forever after. They want to give their energy and intellect to their work as well as to their families. More want to spend their days thinking about bottom lines, deadlines, breakthroughs and strategy – not laundry and cough mixtures. And so they seek to combine both, which is very hard without a nanny or two. Women past their fertile peak are more likely to be able to afford that kind of help.
There are other reasons for delay: women waiting till 40-plus are not perversely letting down the human race for a lark. Rather, they are finding it ever harder to find a man her equal in educational and professional attainment, who is willing to commit. As Marcia Inhorn, a sociologist of infertility at Yale, told me, many women defer motherhood because they want to find a man with whom to parent, not because they want to reject men altogether.
But father-figure men these days are not so easily found. If, a century ago, 21-year-olds went off to war leaving behind families, today’s 21-year-olds can barely bring themselves to respond to text messages, let alone contemplate having girlfriends. I had a conversation with a 25-year-old recently who said he expected to start thinking about serious relationships “in my late thirties”. I went on a socially distanced date with a 35-year-old a few months ago, and even he said he didn’t feel ready to contemplate having children yet. When would he, did he think? Perhaps never, he said. Most male profiles on Bumble state that the man wants “something casual” or “don’t know” what they seek. Many do not want children.
The reasons for declining fertility and older motherhood are complex – the stuff of years of research for demographers and social scientists. But the high expectations women rightly place on their lives beyond the home, and our rising educational and economic status, combined with male struggles with maturity and purpose mean that finding someone to cash in one’s chips with has become a minefield.
By 40, many women are ready to give up on finding him and go it alone – and so they should.