A majority of women have remained childless in Britain past their thirtieth birthday for the first time in recorded history, according to the country’s official statistician.
A report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published on Thursday found that 50.1 per cent of women born in 1990 — the latest age bracket to reach 30 years old — have not had a child, a record high.
The ONS also found that the average number of children birthed by women by the 30th birthday also fell to a record low, with an average of just 0.96 children per woman recorded. In contrast, women who were born in 1941 averaged 1.89 children by the time they reached thirty years of age.
The percentage of women reaching the milestone without having a child has consistently risen since the late 1970s in Britain when approximately 20 per cent were without children. By the year 1990, the figure rose to 37 per cent.
The ONS did note that there was also a long-term trend of women opting to have children later in life, with the most common age for a first birth being 31 years of age.
Commenting on the findings, Amanda Sharfman, of the Centre for Ageing and Demography at the ONS said: “We continue to see a delay in childbearing, with women born in 1990 becoming the first cohort where half of the women remain childless by their 30th birthday. Levels of childlessness by age 30 have been steadily rising since a low of 18% for women born in 1941. Lower levels of fertility in those currently in their 20s indicate that this trend is likely to continue.
“The average number of children born to a woman has been below two for women born since the late 1950’s. While two child families are still the most common, women who have recently completed their childbearing are more likely than their mothers’ generation to have only one child or none at all.”
The decline in women having children by the age of thirty coincides with policies introduced in the 1970s by the government meant to increase female participation in the workforce.
One such anti-family policy is in the area of taxation, with the government opting to levy taxes against individual earners rather than on families as a whole, meaning that families which rely on a single income of £50,000 will take home less money than two salaries of £25,000, thus incentivising women to work rather than stay at home with children.
The government could conceivably give families a leg up by making tax allowances transferable, however, it has so far refused to do so.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a dramatic increase in working women, with female employment hitting a record high of 15.6 million as of 2020 when they represented the majority of new entrants into the economy.
On top of the anti-family taxation system, only lower-income families are afforded marriage allowances, further contributing millions of middle-class women being forced to work to provide for their families rather than being able to raise their children should they desire to do so.
In response to the dramatic decrease in fertility rate (the number of children per woman), the government has sought to mitigate the demographic implications through mass migration, importing millions of migrants over the previous decades.
The waves of mass migration over the past twenty years has seen the foreign-born population of Britain shoot up to nine million, with the total ethnic minority population reaching 13 million, a phenomenon which Migration Watch UK think tank has warned could lead to a breakdown of social cohesion.
In 2020, the ONS also found that nearly one third (28.7 per cent) of all live births were to foreign-born mothers, the highest figure since 1969.
As opposed to the UK’s reliance on mass migration, socially conservative countries in Eastern Europe, such as Poland and Hungary have adopted pro-family policies to incentivise their native populations to reproduce. Hungary, for example, has successfully increased both its marriage and birth rates through economic incentives for mothers, such as granting lifetime tax-exempt status for women who have four or more offspring.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka