I was 38 years old and my biological clock was a ticking time bomb. I had a low ovarian reserve, and if I wanted a child, it was emergency stations – now or never. It felt like it was all my fault. As I sat in a fertility doctor’s office, I burst into tears – and dropped the tear-stained fertility report on the floor.
Why hadn’t I frozen my eggs if I’d known my mum had an early menopause? I had been so cavalier about motherhood, acting like I could have a child whenever I wanted. And why couldn’t I have been more practical and found a stable boyfriend – rather than placing all my chips on true love? The burden was on me – and me alone.
There is a catalogue of reasons for the jaw-dropping global decline in the
birth rate – and it’s usually considered the
women’s fault. I felt like a textbook problem. The UK birth rate plunged to a record low of 1.44 per woman in 2024, well under the 2.1 needed to sustain a population, and we’re always told this is down to women delaying family life, leaving it too late – or deciding not to have a baby at all.
Women have supposedly become too independent and career-oriented to want children. We’re put off by soaring childcare costs, lengthy career breaks, the housing crisis, dating app fatigue, and being “too choosy”, apparently. Money is often seen as the number one enemy. The Office for National Statistics revealed in 2025 that UK women lose about £65,000 in earnings in the five years after their first child – and with three kids, it can reach £100,000.
Yet we still face pro-natalist pressure and societal judgment promoting the idea that motherhood is the pinnacle of a woman’s existence. Governments are panicking. In South Korea, more adult nappies are sold than baby diapers, and the French government sends letters to all 29-year-olds urging them to have children before it’s “too late”.
Being child-free is said to push the UK state pension age to 75 by 2039, and school closures or mergers have become the norm in some areas. But one thing often overlooked in explanations of falling birth rates is men’s Peter Pan–like immaturity. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle.
Finally, that is starting to change. The new report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), titled “
Baby Bust”, said that, in the past, a 24-year-old man would have usually been married, had a child and been working for ten years, but now men are only leaving the nest at the average age of 25.
As a result, roughly 600,000 young women may miss out on motherhood partly because of it. Around 3 million women aged 16 to 45 are now likely never to have children, compared with 2.4 million in their grandparents’ generation.
The biggest hurdle wasn’t just my fertility falling off a cliff, but that my partner wasn’t ready to have kids with me”
Young women now feel vindicated. After years of being the focus of the “baby blame” game, research is catching up with what women have known for years: it takes two to tango. If women can’t find men willing to settle down and commit, having a baby becomes much harder – not impossible, but definitely not easy.
The solution, according to the report, is to encourage marriage at a younger age and for
men to “enter adulthood” earlier than 25. This can be achieved by offering more internships and apprenticeships so that men have to mature faster. It claims nine out of 10 young women hope to have children, yet many will face “unplanned childlessness” – a major cause of grief, which could affect up to 30 per cent of women in the UK.
That could easily have been my story. I was lucky to have children in my late thirties and early forties. The biggest hurdle wasn’t just my fertility falling off a cliff, but that my partner wasn’t ready to have kids with me.
I’d waited for him to commit through my thirties, with our on-off relationship, until we moved into his apartment. That’s when I gave him an ultimatum, then called it off because the pressure was too much, then months later, convinced him to do IVF – which I was lucky he agreed to. The truth is, although it was my choice to wait, it felt like an impossible situation. I was damned if I left him, and damned if I didn’t. At that age, I’d never have fallen in love in time with another man, and using a sperm donor would have ended my relationship.
If he’d been “ready” when my parents had children, 10-15 years earlier, my fertility wouldn’t have been hanging by a thread. By the time I had our daughters, it was termed a “geriatric pregnancy”, meaning a pregnancy in someone aged 35 or older at delivery.
The problem is that some men can spend forever deciding if they are ready – and it’s about time women were let off the hook for the dwindling birth rate. So many women I know never had kids, despite wanting them, because men weren’t ready. Others had children with men they didn’t truly love, just to get it over with. The truth is, if the birth rate is to recover, men need to stop being babies – and start having them instead.
www.independent.co.uk
