To my intense surprise, since society has trumpeted the stigma and prevalence of teenage pregnancy every week since I was 11, I wasn’t able to have children. After two cycles of IVF with no mature eggs, my husband and I got the non-diagnosis of “unexplained infertility”.
Shortly after our non-diagnosis, I went to Australia on a trip. At dinner, I was asked the usual “And do you have kids?” and rather than fudging it as is polite (although polite for whom?), I said no, we’d have loved to, but we couldn’t have them. It’s something I’ve since repeated, partly because I’ve found people often then share their own losses or thoughts, and it’s often more interesting than talking about the weather, and partly because it might make the asker think twice.
Earlier this week, I saw a social media post by All on the Board, an Instagram account I follow on which two Tube workers use TfL boards to share poetry and timely messages. It shared the insensitive things that people can say, including: “Are you going to have children?” It went on: “Honestly, why do people need to know? Some questions people ask can silently hurt the recipient. Just ask ‘how are you?’ and let the conversation flow.” It will have been seen by thousands of commuters and may have given some of them reason to think twice about what being “childless” truly means.
In statistics and the wider media, the term “childless” is usually used simply to describe not having children, for whatever reason, and leaves it at that. This week, it was announced in one academic paper that 5.7 million more American women of “prime childbearing age” – and let us all shudder quietly at that bovine phrase – did not have children in 2024 than historical trends had led forecasters to expect – a significant rise on 2.1 million in 2016 and 4.7 million in 2022. Why is that, do we think? What could mean that women don’t want to become mothers? No, you’re right, it must be selfishness.
In April, Office for National Statistics (ONS) data showed that the fertility rate for England and Wales had dropped to a record low after falling for three consecutive years. More women than ever before are reaching 30 without having become mothers; the average age of new mums in England and Wales climbed to 29 in 2024; and the ONS’s standardised mean age of mothers is now 31, and the highest since records began.
Let us think about why this might be the case. My parents were able to raise two children on a single income, yet I struggle to think of a family I know, in any industry – farming, law, medicine, banking, retail, catering – where both parents are not each working.
Personal satisfaction aside, for many families, it is simply too expensive to live on one income (and all credit to the single parents doing just that), and many grandparents are brought in to provide additional support due to the lack of subsidies on childcare.
Much like many women who don’t have kids, I still have children in my life, through relatives and friends. This also means I am very much aware of the challenges that having children today presents to families, especially where the mother works. One neighbour and their young autistic child, who has not been able to attend mainstream school for months, were at this week’s Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) protest outside Parliament ahead of welfare reform. My friend has not been able to work for over a year due to their child’s support needs not being met.
For many, having children is a choice, and how you are going to raise your child feeds into it. If conditions for raising children responsibly and well aren’t there, then governments and researchers might do well to look into what could improve them. And surely any horror film has taught us that nobody should be forced into becoming a parent, especially people who do not want to. Yet the rolling back of abortion in the US, and the testing the water over here of mixing politics and religion – deep lols at Nigel “children by two mothers” Farage saying that gay marriages were less durable than heterosexual ones – is something that we must be deeply careful about.
Women are not broodmares. Men are not cavemen providing for families. Children are individuals, not future resources or carers for the elderly. And anyone who is childless, in the truest sense of the word, knows what that feels like.
Mmm, prime childbearing age. I’ll order that the next time I go to a steakhouse.
Kat Brown’s anthology No One Talks About This Stuff: Twenty-Two Stories of Almost Parenthood (Robinson) is featured in the Reading Well families list in libraries across England and Wales
