A fifth of women are childless at 45

Record number blamed on decline in marriage

ONE woman in five is reaching the age of 45 without becoming a mother, official figures revealed yesterday.

As a result, their age group has had fewer children per family than any generation on record.

Some 18 per cent of women in England and Wales who celebrated their 45th birthday last year were childless, according to the Office for National Statistics – double the rate in the early 1990s.

The average number of babies a woman of 45 had borne was just 1.9, compared with 2.21 among their mothers’ generation.

The only European countries with higher rates of childlessness are Austria and Spain, separate figures show. A major reason for falling family size is the decline of marriage, the ONS said.

The instability of partnerships and the difficulty of finding a permanent relationship have repeatedly been identified as a cause of delay in choosing to have children.

Its report also cited the costs of a family and women’s need to work, the attractions of a child-free lifestyle and the increasing recognition that women may choose not to have children.

However one reason is ‘the postponement of decisions about whether to have children until it may be biologically too late’.

The findings were based on figures for births among women in England and Wales who were born 1971 and who are considered by the ONS to have reached the end of their childbearing days.

Emily Knipe of the ONS said: ‘Women born in 1971 who completed their childbearing in 2016 had an average 1.90 children for each woman, the lowest level on record. Childlessness is one of the main drivers of falling completed family sizes by the end of childbearing.’ Records of the final size of families were first collected in 1965, when each woman born in 1920 was found to have had an average of two children. Family size peaked for women born in the mid-1930s, with an average of 2.42 children.

The ONS said millions of women whose mothers would have stayed at home raising families have gone through university and into careers. Often they have had children late or not at all.

‘Increasing childlessness may be

‘It will mean more lonely old people’

due to a decline in the proportion of women married,’ the report said. It added that other reasons could be changes in the perceived costs and benefits of child-rearing versus work and leisure activities and greater social acceptability of a child-free lifestyle, together with the effects of the biological clock.

The likelihood of a woman having a large family is also dropping, the ONS said.

Only one in ten who turned 45 in 2016 had four or more children, half the number of their parents’ generation. Author and researcher Patricia Morgan said: ‘There is one obvious effect of this: there are a lot of lonely older people now and there are going to be many more of them.

‘This does mean that there is going to be a lot of extra weight on the state and social services. Those without families will have no one to help. Families do a lot for each other that would cost a fortune for the state to provide.’

Figures from the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, showed that the rate of childlessness in women aged between 40 and 44 in industrialised nations rose from 14 per cent in 1995 to 20 per cent in 2010.

In Spain, the figure was 21.6 per cent and Austria on 21.5 per cent. In the US it was 18.8 per cent, similar to that of Britain. But it was only 16 per cent in Australia, 13 per cent in Sweden, 6.8 per cent in South Korea and just 4.5 per cent in Turkey.