Philobiblon

Late last year some fascinating figures came out of Scotland: “31.2% of Scottish women born between 1960 and 1963 do not have children, and … if the current trend continues, 40% of women born between 1970 and 1973 will not have children.” It is estimated that only about 7 per cent of those suffer from medical problems that meant this wasn’t an active choice.

The article to which that link points is typical of the response – spluttering incomprehension, then an assumption that the women must have just stupidly “forgotten” to have children. People – or at least journalists, doctors and NHS officials – seem to have a lot of problems believing that women are adults who do make choices for themselves.

Dr Gillian Penney, who carried out the research, went back and double-checked the numbers. “I was very surprised to see these figures, I thought there must have been a mistake,” she says. “A third of women not having had a child seems so high. I would have thought around 10% would have been realistic. But more than 30%? I was very surprised.”
Even more puzzling for Penney was the women in the next age bracket she studied, those born from 1970 to 1973. “If that line keeps following the path it is on, it is quite startling,” she adds.
“One of the things that seems clear is that for the majority of these women it is not infertility stopping them having children: it is choice. Some have made that decision as a positive choice, but for others they will have thought to themselves ‘one day, one day’ and keep putting it off until it is too late.”

But that of course is an active choice. Not wanting to have a child “now” – women do know that may mean never, even if they won’t admit it to social researchers and friends because they will make a big fuss or express disapproval about it.

The comparable figure for the whole of the UK is about 20 per cent, and rising. I couldn’t find any figures – anyone know of any? – but I’m sure that would be considerably swayed by the high fertility rate of immigrant women. If you took the figures for women born in the UK (Scotland has relatively few immigrants) I suspect they’d be similar to the Scottish ones.

(There’s a summary of a sensible-looking study of the issue here, that makes the point this is by no means an “alternative” choice.)

I’m not in any way saying there is anything wrong with having children – at least a reasonable number of them – but it is really about time that it was recognised that childlessness is a reasonable choice that women are making, which should not be a cause for surprise or disapproval.

UPDATE: I forget earlier to add the comment that, while many don’t realise it, we’re actually heading back towards historical norms. The post WWII period saw historically extraordinarily high levels of marriage and childbearing, but it was these that were out of step with the general norm. For example, in London in 1911, 19 per cent of women in their mid-forties had never married (and it is reasonable to assume that nearly all of those had not had children). (S. Inwood, City of Cities: The Birth of Modern London, Macmillan, 2005, p. 11)