The fertility rate in England and Wales has hit a record low, and policymakers are worried. But the declining birth rate debate rarely stops to ask what women actually need to make having children a viable choice.
The Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) recording of fertility and birth rates over the past half decade have begun to spark concern amongst some academics and newspaper headlines in the UK.
The recent data has shown a continued decline in the fertility rate in England and Wales, bringing it to 1.41 as of 2024, according to ONS data.
The fertility rate (TRF) is counted as the number of children per woman over a period in which she is largely able to get pregnant.
This is counted as between the ages of 15 and 45. Statistics are also measured by the live birth rate, meaning the number of live births that happen in the country each year. In 2023, the live birth number dropped to its lowest since 1977, with 591,072 live births taking place in England and Wales that year.
These statistics have begun to spark various headlines and academic conversations over recent years. Other countries that are facing similar declines have brought about or suggested policy changes to try to combat these trends.
Hungary, for example, has introduced tax cuts for women with over 4 kids, but this has also been paired with restrictive reproductive rights policies. In Hungary, abortion is permitted up to 12-weeks but, as suggested by Population Matters, is only granted after ‘mandatory counselling sessions’.
Other countries with a lowering fertility rate and increasingly ‘aging-populations’ such as Japan, Korea, and Australia have tried to implement small bursts of financial incentives to encourage people to have children, such as tax breaks, subsidised childcare, or one-off payments.
This is because one big factor stopping people from having kids or as many as they had before is the financial cost of rearing children. Even with both parents working, the cost of childcare, inability to secure affordable housing, and the general cost of living have made it harder for potential parents to envision the possibility of affording to raise children.
A report by the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies found that ‘only a quarter of millennials who want children are trying for them.’ This included those who had already had children and wanted more (a quarter of whom were not actively trying to conceive despite wanting children). Of those who were yet to have children, half of them wanted children, but only 1 in 4 were actively trying to conceive.
The main reasons stopping the respondents were tied to financial concerns. There is clearly a disconnect between the desire to have children and the practicality for many millennials of a typical child-rearing age (for this study, it was counted as 32).
Why is this such a concern to certain institutions?
Well, the main problem for various policy makers and what various academics argue is that with a decreased fertility rate, the population begins to decline, and the rate at which you have a stable population is at least 2.1 per woman during their fertility window. Non-replacement means a shrinking younger population.
This could cause various issues with social care, as there are fewer workers available to provide social care for the ageing population. It is suggested that this could also create a deficit of working age people paying taxes to pay for care and other government infrastructures. Some argue this may lead to a shrink in the economy, for companies, there will be a deficit of workers and consumers, and in a capitalist model, that doesn’t work for continued profit growth.
But is it truly a problem? Wasn’t it just years ago that concerns of ‘overpopulation’ were making the rounds? Certainly, various governments, including the UK and Scottish governments, and various outlets think so.
The Atlantic called it a ‘crisis’, which is ‘worse’ than we think. But others argue it is not a sure problem; immigration has long been used to bolster numbers in the workplace. Given that the world population is still steadily growing, countries with declining birth rates may look to continue to source workers from countries whose birth rates are still rising.
Of course, many would argue this is not a fair solution; not only do people face discrimination in countries they come to work in, but workers from the global majority shouldn’t have to, or indeed may not want to, fulfil workplace demands, particularly if conditions improve in their own countries.
The thing is that declining birth rates are only a problem if governments commit to simply continuing the structures of society that make the ‘replacement rate’ a great necessity. Such as a continued need for never-ending economic growth, focus on GDP, focus on tax from work, rather than wealth, and the structures of social care we currently have.
These schemes for incentivising parents often fall short of true economic restructuring that would make child-rearing feasible for many. A short increase in money doesn’t curb a minimum of 18 years of high cost, which only seems to be getting worse.
It also doesn’t solve the biological medical decline of fertility in men and women, or the cultural changes that have already taken place, which means people, and many women, don’t want kids, or as many as before.
Population Connection argues in particular that places where women are more empowered are where women tend to have fewer kids, and the later they can have them, the more freedom, economic and otherwise, they can exercise. This is where women or people with the faculties to have children are often seemingly left out of the question.
What should the feminist argument be?
Whether we should be concerned about a declining population or not, aspects affecting women in attempts to increase birth rates seem to be missing from the conversation.
Many women who want to have children are increasingly aware of the financial cost to them that this entails now. For women, or people who have to bear the responsibility of pregnancy in order to have children, maternity leave and career breaks affect their chances on the career ladder much more than they do for those who take a small paternity leave.
In the UK, mothers can have up to a year of maternity leave, whereas paid paternity leave (or leave where you are the long-term partner of the expecting mother) is only up to 2 weeks.
An IFS study showed that women still leave jobs or cut their working hours even when they earn more than their male partner. The study claims that this often leads to hourly wages stagnating, as reduced hours often correlate with a slowdown in career progression.
On top of that, the impact on their bodies is often severely understated, argued away as something ‘natural’ despite the fact that according to the World Health Organisation, ‘every day in 2023, over 700 women died from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.’ In the UK, official statistics have shown that maternal mortality has increased despite declining birth rates.
For many women, the sacrifice continues to extend well beyond pregnancy and childbirth itself. Despite Hochschild’s The Second Shift being published over 35 years ago, many working women still face unequal domestic and childcare loads.
According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, “The latest available data shows employed women spend about 2.3 hours daily on housework; for employed men, this figure is 1.6 hours. Gender gaps in housework participation are the largest among couples with children”.
Despite some couples working together to equal out the load of work, even those with an improved balance, even performing equal duties, fail to equalise what has been termed as the ‘the mental load’, this refers to the thought and planning behind the running of a household and looking after children.
Whilst some male partners might ‘do’ an equal amount, that is at the direction, management, and constant reminding from the female partner. In motherhood, this multiplies and includes the mental load behind remembering and scheduling children’ s appointments, activities etc. Because of its less ‘visible’ nature, it is something that many men still fail to recognise.
Another problem many women face is a society that is increasingly hostile to mothers and children. Many new mothers struggle with high levels of loneliness, and isolation. Kids are increasingly not welcome, or parents are disparaged for allowing them in adult spaces. This relegates mothers to a kid only space, leaving them isolated from adult peers and in-depth conversations.
The nuclear family set up as a focus for policy, and still a large norm in society, forces new mothers into a structure of loneliness that even mothers with a large family and friend network struggle with.
UK society in particular, has moved towards a much more kids focused and safety concerned approach to parenting, and a lack of acceptance of kids in non-child-dedicated spaces leaves many mothers with the never-ending job of watching and monitoring their children, leaving them struggling to be involved in much else.
A cultural change which is more child-friendly and welcome to multi-generational spaces, as well as a safer country which is accessible for children to begin navigating from an early age, would allow mothers a healthier dose of societal interaction and integration with society after beginning parenthood.
Given that a high percentage of women are still the primary caretakers of children, this is an argument feminists must insist on both in this debate around declining birthrates and as a part of female empowerment in general.
We must also question the narrative of many of these debates, which, for me, often sideline the very voices which the debate seems to be addressing.
This is a role that, for many women, is still expected of them, whether they want children or not. The idea that women must be a kind of machine, simply producing more people for the needs of society, is an inherently sexist thought.
Various conservative or misogynist influencers have also hijacked this debate, often looking to blame women’s empowerment in the workplace as a societal ill and framing declining birth and fertility rates as evidence of that. In many ways, declining birth rates mean a healthier and safer society for women, evidencing that they have had agency in the choice of having children.
The seductive aesthetics of ‘trad-wife-ism’ seems almost manufactured to manipulate young women back into what patriarchy has long claimed ‘as the natural place’ of women.
Feminists must resist these discourses, but empower women who want to have children to be able to do so in a way that maintains the most amount of agency, equality and inclusion in the world when they do.
If declining birth rates really are a problem, we must not succumb to the pleas of policy makers and business owners and simply be ‘put back in place’; instead, we must demand cultural, economic, and societal change to make motherhood much more equal.
