As new figures show one in six women born in 1970 don't have a family, KATE SPICER explains the real reason she ended up one of the childless generation
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About 15 years ago my reproductive system became fair conversational game. I can’t remember which came first — was it, ‘You’d better settle down if you want kids’ or ‘You know, you’d better get a move on’?
But for the next ten years that advice regularly hummed in my ears until the nagging took on a more terminal note. ‘So you never wanted kids, then?’ or, once or twice, ‘It’s such a shame, you’d have made a good mother.’
By the time I’d hit my mid-40s, I had seen the twins piling up in the older mothers among my friends; I had heard their stories about endless cycles of IVF. I wasn’t going to go there.
Barring my becoming some kind of statistical freak or another desperate woman enduring the fertility medicine unmerry-go-round, it was game over for me and baby-making. I’d left it too late.
These are the same words Lisa Snowdon, 44, used in the I’m A Celebrity camp. I know I am not alone and that Snowdon and I aren’t especially exceptional.
One women in six born in 1970 doesn’t have children, according to the Office for National Statistics. Not since the Twenties have figures been this high.
Those figures rise if you’ve had a university education, which I have. Or if you live in a city, which I do.
Much has been written about the steady rise in women who die without furthering their genetic line. The ONS numbers put 12 per cent of my mother’s Baby Boomer generation as childless, with specifically those born in 1943 looked at for this study. For ‘Generation X’, specifically those born in 1970, the figure is 17 per cent.
The ONS assumes a woman’s childbearing potential starts at 15 and ends the day before her 46th birthday.
However, there is a small, rather deluded, part of me that, aged 47, still hopes in these last declining fertile years that a miracle may happen. When I interviewed alternative fertility therapist Emma Cannon a few years ago she told me women can be too thin to get pregnant and the Chinese recommend eating pork fat to boost a woman’s fertility.
I still look at pork scratchings and the fat on pork belly as some kind of (delicious) fertility treatment.
The menopause is drawing in like some long sleepless sweaty night after a day in the sun and I know that tiny stupid hope will fade for ever. Family is at the centre of my life. When my parents are no longer here, family life will contract considerably. I love my friends, but they are not the sun around which my life spins, nor is work. I’m crazy about my dog, but he won’t be there when I die. Increasingly I think, perhaps no one will?
You might think I am a depressive weeping into a never-worn Babygro, but actually, I’m a cheery, middle-aged woman, dealing with the fact I don’t have the family I expected.
I don’t talk about it much, except out of the corner of my mouth to other friends who don’t have kids. ‘How have you been?’ they’ll say. ‘Oh, OK, just feeling a bit flat about not having kids,’ I’ll say. ‘I even had a little cry about it the other day.’
They might say, ‘Me too’ and then we get on with gossiping over other more tangible facts of our lives.
This apparent flippancy can seem a bit like the fridge magnet of the woman with her hands clamped to her face going, ‘Oh no, I forgot to have kids!’, but it disguises strong feelings that must be dealt with in an accepting, philosophical way.
No one ever knows the real reasons why a person doesn’t have kids. A Dutch study found that only 10 per cent of women without children actively choose to be that way.
And I’m often tempted to tell someone who’s rude enough to ask why I don’t have kids, ‘I just never wanted one and it’s none of your business’ or, ‘my womb was torn out in an horrific car accident in which my entire family died.’ Anything to shut them up.
The truth is, I’m not one of those women who desperately wanted kids. I had an abortion at 18, when I wasn’t ready to bring up a child. And when I was, I wasn’t prepared to jump through traumatic and costly medical hoops in order to make it happen. My hunch is, like me, the majority of the one in six childless women just missed the boat. Which is less easy to explain. Is it a decline in marriage? Concerns about the cost of living?
Is it that there is a lot more to do these days than just keep house and make a family and an increased acceptability of what the ONS calls ‘the child-free lifestyle’?
Is it the oft-cited threat to a career that a baby represents? Or the endless fun you can have without responsibilities. Or is it that society doesn’t put the same pressure on women to breed? When I was a teenager, childless women were thought of as peculiar. Now they’re normal. I’m normal.
All of the above play their part in my slide into the one in six. The ONS highlights ‘the postponement of decisions about whether to have children until it may be biologically too late’.
That postponement is the effect of all these causes and more for me.
My relationships failed before we got to the sensible baby-making stage. Yes, there were fun distractions too.
All of these reasons are collectively known as the causes of being ‘childless by circumstance’ as the Dutch study called it, rather than by choice or sad biological curse.
‘Childless by circumstance,’ that’s me, and probably Lisa Snowdon too. Her brief explanation was, ‘I left it kind of late…I didn’t find anybody that I wanted to actually be with and I didn’t want to just [have kids]. I wanted that unit kind of thing.’
I feel the same way. A unit — a couple if not a big church wedding and a perfect chocolate box home — seemed the only way to do it.
The situation never arose when having children would make sense, and by the time it did when I met my current boyfriend, it was, as the ONS puts it, ‘biologically too late’.
My relationships failed before we got to the sensible baby-making stage. Yes, there were fun distractions too
I grew up in a middle-class culture. Teenage pregnancy was an obsession in the Eighties. Teen mums were scapegoats for society’s evils.
Early motherhood seemed like something that would rob you of every freedom you held dear. Watching my divorced mother struggle alone did not help.
I practised sensible contraception for a decade or so, and only started thinking about going for it in my early thirties. This involved being rather sloppy with precautions.
It was hardly an act of focus and intent, I just didn’t fret if I forgot to take the Pill. I never did get pregnant. What I didn’t realise was that a lot of women don’t just get pregnant at the drop of a hat (or should that be cap?) and many people have to concentrate on making babies. I was 40 when I met my current boyfriend. He was extremely against having a child, having already had one with his ex.
It took me time to persuade him to trust me enough to give it a go.
By 42 I was clinging to the cliff face of fertility. Yes, I ate more pork fat, and gave up smoking, but I didn’t give up drinking a bottle or two of wine a week — which I should have done.
Emma Cannon told me that to get pregnant a woman needs to reduce her workload, stop going out, take it easy.
Flogging away at work certainly wasn’t stress-free but I couldn’t afford to give it up.
Too old for the NHS, should I have sold everything to fund intrusive, rarely successful IVF at approximately £4,000 a cycle? My gut and some science told me having a child late in life was risky for its health.
If I went fanatically at babymaking was I inviting a sickly child into the world just to please my own desires? This thought plagued me.
In conversations with other childless women I’ve always heard more or less the same story. Some did try IVF, others weren’t obsessive enough to make baby-making their overarching priority. They had expected to get pregnant. And didn’t.
Yes, there’s a small sad place in my soul that I’ll take to my grave reserved for the family I never had. Just typing these words makes me feel a bit tearful. I didn’t work hard at having a child. I didn’t realise I had to.
For many of the one in sixes like me, I suspect that’s a common story.