Sadly, being able to afford a family is now turning into a luxury

FOR years now the slow but steady decline in Western birth rates has been blamed on selfish women in pursuit of ‘having it all’. In our eagerness to indulge our own ambitions, the thinking goes, we ignore our biological clock – with dire consequences both for ourselves and society.

The price for freedom and selffulfilment (or punishment for our vanity, depending on your point of view) is infertility and IVF. The judgmentalism that surrounds older mothers – or those who don’t want children at all – is astonishing and antediluvian.

Even now they are considered an abomination, an affront to the correct order of things. I’ll never forget a friend of mine being told she was acting in wilful defiance of her ‘biological imperative’. Hard to imagine anyone ever saying that to a man.

Anyway, the point is that, like it or not, having children is now a choice for a woman. It’s easy to forget that for my mother’s generation – and all those who came before – it was not.

Which is why the past 50 or so years have been so seismic. Women have obtained control over their bodies and their lives. Hence the declining birth rate.

As my mother once said to me, years ago, ‘If people thought for more than 30 seconds about having children, Sarah, the human race would grind to a halt.’ She had a point. This week marked a new twist in this ongoing saga. The latest figures show that more than half of women now remain childless at the age of 30 – the first time that has happened since records began. Not only that, but the overall drop in births is not where you would expect it to be – that is to say, among ambitious career-class women. On the contrary, data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that from 2011 to 2019 the share of births to women in ‘higher managerial, administrative and professional’ occupations grew from 45.2 to 49.3 per cent. No, it’s among those on lower incomes, unemployed or with poor employment prospects where the decline is steepest – with their share of births falling from 25.9 to 23.1 per cent. What this shows, I think, is that it’s less about women not wanting children – and more about simply not being in a position to afford them. The truth is that for the past two decades the things that families need – an affordable house, childcare, food, decent education – have been drifting steadily further out of the reach of ordinary people.

The average house price in the UK is now £270,000. And yet the average annual salary is just under £40,000. Most young people haven’t a hope of getting on the housing ladder, and even if they do they’ll need two sets of wages to stay there. The model of a two-parent family where one person works and the other raises the next generation is increasingly unsustainable.

Even I, with my well-paid job and plenty of advantages, spent pretty much all of my salary – after tax and National Insurance – on childcare during the early years of my children’s lives. I did it because I enjoyed working, and also because I was worried that if I dropped out of the workforce, I would never get back in. But if I found it tight, God only knows how most people cope.

And things have become much worse since I was having babies. I’m no socialist, but so much of the support that used to be offered to young families has been withdrawn. Increasingly, it seems to me, being able to afford a family has become a luxury.

So yes, women are having fewer children, and later on in life. But I don’t think it’s always for ‘selfish’ reasons, rather a practical response to the financial restrictions imposed upon them by a cost of living crisis that only seems to be deepening.

If policymakers are worried about a dearth of future taxpayers to prop up an ageing society, they need to stop being so short-sighted – and address the soaring cost of family life in the here and now. Otherwise we’ll all end up paying the price.

THE sombre- sounding Discrimina- tion Law Association (they must be super fun at a party) have called for the menopause to be reclassified as a ‘protected characteristic’. Seriously? It’s bad enough finding work as a woman over 50. Turning us into a legal liability would be the final nail in the coffin.