Birth rate hits record low - 1.49 children per woman

[MidnightPatrol]

The ONS has released its latest data on the UK birthrate.

The number of children per women has dropped from 1.55 in 2022 to 1.49 in 2022 - the lowest on record.

This is the lowest number of births in the UK since 2002 - when the population was 10 million people smaller.

Do we think this problem will inevitably worsen? Are there particular reasons people are having less children (unique to the UK vs the rest of the world?).

Should we be taking steps to increase it / stop it reducing further?

If the population decreases house prices will go down
Houses will fall into disrepair and fall down because no one wants to in them.

People bemoan lack of housing now

Can’t we get to a more balanced level by decreasing to supply more equal to demand?

Perhaps they will become more affordable and people will then be able to buy them

Try this

Sell me the idea of having children.

Why should anyone do it?

Exactly, @minipie. Figuring out how to manage this birth rate decline is what needs to be addressed by today’s 20 and 30-something’s (and younger generations of course). They’re the people who’ll be most affected when we middle-aged folks (I’m nearly 50) drop off our perches. 😂

I do think that house prices will drop as the Boomer generation dies off and the supply increases.

Couples are having babies later and as a result infertility is increasing. There is research that shows a large proportion of women who do not have children, did want children.
We need to stop pushing the message that infertility treatment is usually successful. A lot of infertility treatment has fairly low outcomes, especially with older couples.

Sperm count plummeting probably also a factor:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/18/health/sperm-counts-decline-debate/index.html

Yes true.
Infertility and men not wanting to commit to having children is at the root.

Thank you. Fascinating graphic.

I agree that these are factors, but I think they are both connected to\arise from the ability of women to be economically independent of men.

Previously women had children mostly (or at least in large part) by default. This is no longer the case, are we reaching a point where the default position for women is to be childless?

I’m at -15 babies now, myself. There is a massive increase in people needing help to conceive, for a multitude of reasons, but given the huge numbers of (young, slim, healthy-looking) people in their 20s and early 30s I come across doing IVF, it is more than just late 30s/40s couples ‘leaving it too late’.

I’ve had a leading urologist tell me that sperm quality has hugely declined in the last few decades, it is well known and thought to be due to plastic exposure and toxins affecting hormones as well as bad diets etc.

I’ve spoken to an embryologist who was part of a Harvard study on an overall decline in embryo quality and egg quality within IVF, which they found to be due to plastic exposure and they couldn’t get any governments to take an interest. No-one wants to hear that that modern lives are toxic.

Apparently egg quality decline is also cumulative across generations so the amount of plastic exposure or other endocrine toxins my grandmother and mother (my eggs were in her when I was a foetus) faced will affect any daughters’ eggs. Meaning each generation will get progressively less fertile and it will take decades to show the full impact.

But probably better there are fewer humans, as we are far exceeding the resource capacities of our planet. So meh.

Having children is stressful here, right from the start. My midwife was running between me and another woman, so my partner was left to pull the emergency alarm on his own when things went wrong. Pain relief afterwards was limited and again very few midwives around, staying on a huge, noisy ward. My son has been diagnosed autistic - was lucky to get the diagnosis, as it takes years, but after that there's very little practical support available. You are pointed towards online helpsheets and left to get on with it.

Cost of living must be having a major impact on this. It’s good for the planet but won’t be good for the economy. We’re seeing the effects already and it’s going to get worse before it improves.

I am all for populations dropping; and I know what that will mean in the short term. I think the issue in the UK is a drop in birth rate and people not keeping themselves healthy.

I think it is partly down to the cost of living and in particular the expense of housing and childcare, but the fact is that whenever women are given full control over their fertility, they choose to have fewer children. I have one child by choice, which would simply not have been an option in the days before reliable contraception. I’m sure cheaper housing and childcare would make some difference, but any significant change to the birth rate would have to involve massive restrictions on women’s reproductive freedom, which I sincerely hope no government would consider.

People love bringing up affordability but looking around me and looking at statistics, the better educated women are, the less kids they tend to have.

I'm nearly 30 and so many colleagues and female friends find dating a struggle. Unless you're ok with being a single parent, how do you even begin to think of having kids? Misogyny is on the rise. I work in a male-dominated environment and hearing the way so many of these young guys talk about women (they mostly see me as somewhat "one of them" these days as I'm dating a woman and am fairly androgynous looking now) makes me wonder if most are like this when women they're interested in aren't around.

If you think interactive porn i.e. OF, camgirls etc is unacceptable in a relationship, good luck finding a partner. Men who don't indulge in that are exceedingly hard to find. Women still do the majority of childcare and work around the house. You want someone who contributes their fair share automatically? Good luck.

It definitely doesn't help matters that online dating is now the de facto method of dating. You see the worst of humanity here and then it starts to make sense why people (especially Gen Zs) are eschewing dating with starting a family as a goal in favour of casual situationships and singledom.

I think it good in the long-term for our planet to have a reduced population.

Short-term there may be problems if there are less younger people to look after the older people but it doesn't make sense to have more children for this short-term reason.

Besides, I can't see a decrease in population being an issue just yet. In fact, where I live, the population is increasing significantly due to immigration-I live in a place which has had the second highest growth in population in the UK in the last 10 years. Not being able to get a GP appointment, no beds at the hospitals, long waits in A&E, not enough school places, not enough police etc is more of a problem where I live.

I agree it is nothing to do with affordability. If it was, the better off you became, the more children you would have. And that simply is not the case.
When I was a child you would get devout catholic families with 16 children living in dire poverty. No one these days thinks that is a good idea, but it is naive to think this is about money.

I just checked out some ONS data for uk and interestingly the percentage of women who had at least one child by age 45 has been reasonably consistent since 1920 ( and is actually higher than in 1960). However the percentage of women who have had a child before they’re 30 has gone from >80% in 1940 to just over 40% now. So that suggests that the proportion of childless people is about the same ( albeit probably more voluntarily and fewer involuntarily than historically ) but that people who do have kids have fewer, potentially as they leave it later so can’t have loads of kids as run out of fertile years.

That’s before you bring in other reasons for smaller family sizes such as cost, aspirations, time etc.

Should have added, obviously there's a lag in that data as complete data sets only available for people born in 1977. Remains to be seen whether the number of vol in tardily childless people is much higher in those born in 80s and 90s.

@LaPalmaLlama The difference is that in the past mothers having a child at 45 will have already had children and this will have been their last. Like DP who is the fourth. Now days we are seeing mothers having their first child at 45. I know lots of women who have one child because they started late and that is all they could have.

A big factor is childcare and the cost of it. We’re doing three days a week and paying over a grand a month. We’d love one more but cost is a big factor.

Childcare needs to be cheaper or it needs to be possible to survive on one wage.

There is an increase in immigration to the UK and most of it are apparently in the health and care sector. For example https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67620262
If we keep aging, we either have to keep importing more young people to look after our elderlies, or we accept a lower level of care.
We seem to be unable to accept the later and then also want the population to decrease. We can't have our cake and eat it.

People always blame immigration for waits in a&e and housing etc, but it's old people who tend to be living in houses too big for them (my dad, aunty June, aunty Maureen, uncle John and aunty Deb- all 75+) and who tend to spend a larger proportion of their time in gp surgeries and hospitals. Personally, I think we should legalise euthanasia. I've seen the way some of my elderly relatives are existing. I don't want that. Let me retire at 65, have a good 10 years (which is still less than the generation above me) and I'll pop off. My kids will be 45ish, so if there's any money left, it will benefit them more than me.

And primary schools need more kids. There are already starting to be redundancies and mixed classes.