Louise Perry is Wrong: It Isn’t a Mystery Why Women Have Stopped Having Children
“We have no idea why population growth has gone into reverse. This is perhaps the greatest sociological mystery of our time,” claimed the normally wise Louise Perry in the Spectator recently. The rest of the article was eminently sensible and offered a clear examination of the perils to society of falling birth rates. The UK’s replacement rate (fertility needed for population stability) is around 2.08 to 2.1 children per woman, but the current Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is approximately 1.44. But there is nothing at all mysterious about why women have stopped having babies in the UK: mortgages and morality account for most of it.
Firstly mortgages. It’s a well understood case that first time buyers in the UK are now aged approximately 33 years compared with 24-25 in the 1970s. It used to be the case in the 1970s-90s that an average house price in the UK was three to four times a single person’s salary, it is now seven to eight times higher, requiring two working incomes in order to buy a house. This shift also coincided with the abandonment of multi-generational living and increased rent. Being unable to set up a family household until you are well into your 30s has obvious impacts on the age at which women can even begin to contemplate having children.
The second M: morality. The shift in morality around motherhood is altogether a more pernicious reason for declining birth-rates. Since the 1960s motherhood has been depicted as bad thing for mothers particularly, the planet generally and of scant relevance to the child.
Quite how this has escaped Louise Perry’s notice is surprising as the evidence is everywhere. Where to begin? Cyril Connolly’s 1938 line “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”, 1970s feminist Shulamith Firestone describing pregnancy as “barbaric”, Germaine Greer calling the family a “sick organism” with a mother at its “dead heart”. The idea that motherhood was an oppressive burden, that mothers were to be laughed at and pitied, that everyone, mothers, fathers and their babies would be better off with the babies in nurseries, took terrible hold on the collective consciousness. Which politician would dream of saying today as Lincoln did, “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother”?
Where once motherhood was, perhaps overly idealised, it is now seen as something that can be easily avoided, or attempted only while also conducting a successful career. Mothering and parenting more widely has been entirely devalued as having negligible influence over a child’s life, with children instead being viewed as tabula rasa entirely at the mercy of mental health conditions or big tech giants.
Most books published about mothers after the 1960s generally have them as psychopaths – Oranges are Not the Only Fruit or Motherwell for instance, and depictions of being a mother are almost entirely negative: any work by Rachel Cusk or The Motherload by Sarah Hoover. When motherhood is being positively considered by the publishing industry it’s invariably in the format of manuals that suggest early parenting is going to be one long nightmare of sleepless nights and a slog to stop them becoming a depressed or unmanageable teenager. How I long for more contemporary literature that depicts mothers and the entwined joy of childhood as beautifully and honestly as Laurie Lee does in Cider with Rosie. His passage brings tears to my eyes every time I read it:
Though she tortured our patience and exhausted our nerves, she was all the time, building up around us, by the unconscious revelations of her loves, an interpretation of man and the natural world so unpretentious and easy that we never recognised it then, yet so true that we never forgot it. Nothing now that I ever see that has the edge of gold around it – the change of a season, a jewelled bird in a bush, the eyes of orchids, water in the evening, a thistle, a picture, a poem – but my pleasure pays some brief duty to her. She tried me at times to the top of my bent. But I absorbed from birth, as now I know, the whole earth through her jaunty spirit.
How are mothers depicted today? Lily Allen blithely discusses her “four or five” abortions on a BBC podcast, former child star Miley Cyrus says she refuses to bring children into a damaged planet and a significant portion of the anti-immigrant conversation is condemnatory about the larger families that certain groups have.
For those of us who have made the ‘brave’ decision to have children, it is social death to let anyone know how much we love being a mother, how it is quite the most wonderful thing ever undertaken, how our children thrill us. When my children were younger I went to a fancy drinks party and an imposing man of business asked me what I did. I said I cared for my then two young babies. He drank his drink dry, said “Oh, I’m sorry,” and walked off. No, instead, mothers have to pretend that it’s all a terrible burden, a bore, and something that can be got through only with bucket loads of white wine. Remember those awful books, Why Mummy Drinks? The Scummy Mummies are still doing the rounds, enjoying a regional theatre tour in 2026.
Until the vibes change and motherhood again is presented as a deeply pleasurable and meaningful experience, young women and men will continue to choose the gym and lie-ins over the deep joy of creating new life. Shame.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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Money is not a factor. The economics is a matter of priorities. Before, people didn’t eat out all the time, didn’t go on holidays everywhere, didn’t have every latest electronic gadget at their disposal, clothes were mended rather than thrown away and replaced. And instead all the money went to trying to build a home and raise a family.
Today, everyone expects to have a life bountiful in material comforts.
But the rest I agree with. Being a mother has been demonised.
If you are a teenage girl today and say that your ambition is to have a husband and raise a family, you won’t just not be encouraged, you’ll be positively dissuaded and made to feel as if you are weird, perhaps even a bit mentally deficient.
Of course money is a factor, and is based on the lie that housing is an investment you can also live in . If housing cost get out of kilter with average earnings then it will detrimentally affect a society being able to continue itself. Housing is not primarily an investment it is a fundamental resource and should be treated differentially as a result.
Other of things are fundamental too. Food, clothing. Are you suggesting “fundamental” things should be given to us or made easier for us by someone else?
Life is about the struggle to survive and thrive. Unless of course you have the mindset of a slave, in which case you think someone else – generally the government – has to provide the “fundamental” things for you.
I am not suggesting they should be given, but I am suggesting that they should not be taken, by the incorrect valuation both of what they are for and therefore how they should be valued. If you believe in freedom then the average man should be cable of average living, which is clearly not currently the case
Its all by design of course, governments everywhere realised that roughly 50% of the adult population were not contributing to taxation, so they instigated feminism among other ideas.
Which is not to suggest that Feminism and its aims are all bad per se, but at the very least was co-opted to make more women taxpayers.
I remember a mortgage was calculated as 2.5 to 3 times the man’s income. Yes, that how it was, in those days.
Then it was 3 times the husband, plus once times the wife’s.
Then, more neutrally, 3 + 1 times.
Then, it gradually increased to 3 times joint income, at the insistence that a woman’s income was just as important as the man’s.
And no-one within the Establishment recognised that this would increase house prices still further.
Funny really, especially if you already had a house and didn’t want to upgrade.
I suggest security in all its forms is the main issue. And who today feels secure.
Housing is an asset. Asset value is inflation proof, either keeping pace with inflation or moving slightly ahead. Wage inflation always lags well behind monetary inflation, which is why many people today cannot afford to buy property.
Buying a house means its selling price will inflate faster than the mortgage repayments made to purchase it, then you are better off than renting.
£100 000 invested in a property in 1970, would probably be about £1.2 million today. £100 000 put in a suitcase in 1970, today would probably be about £20 000. (Numbers illustrative, not literal.)
The problem is, that inflation rate – caused by Government.
That is why a house IS an inflation-proof investment. It’s fact not lie.
Most of the time that is true, but a few years ago it was the other way round. One of the managers I worked under used the term “negative equity”, in his house! That was in Milton Keynes, and the market value was less than the mortgage. Some had some difficulty moving on account of that – mid 1990s, I think.
Not necessarily true. Your own home may appreciate in value, but cannot be considered an asset unless you are able to realise that value – rarely that you can fully do so before it’s eaten up by later life care costs or IHT. Then there are times when there’s a “correction” in the housing market – usually as a result of Government mismanagement – remember negative equity? Not really for the present discussion is how seriously the WEF Great Reset may threaten private housing in the near future.
Not true any more! I sold my house house recently after living there for 10 years. I put the purchase price into an inflation calculator and lo and behold the sale price achieved (after trying to sell for 18 months) was nowhere near what it should have been if the value had kept pace with inflation.
You still had a house. The problem when moving is the stamp duty in addition to other expenses.
I’m in my late 30s. My wife and I earn around 100K, we have just purchased our first home, and we can not afford to eat out, or do much of anything anymore. We want to have children but I constantly worry about being bankrupted by it.
All my cohort are in the same boat, either they will never have children, as they have been taught primarily to think of themselves and career, or they cannot afford a home suitable for family life.
Money is the primary factor for anyone raised in a conservative manner. I have older gents who now work for me, who all purchased their first homes for between 15 and 30K on apprentice salaries; these properties are now worth between 300 and 700k.
I’m sorry, but life was never easy. This notion that young (ish) people have that life was simple and easy and affordable in the past are just plain wrong.
Life has always been tough. We had to scrape and save. Getting a job in the first place wasn’t that easy. We had a lot less than we have now.
I know. I was there.
For the majority of people, life is extremely easy: They need to get out of bed five days of every seven, wash or shower themselves every couple of days (not all of them do that), change into ‘outside clothes’ and perform some largely nominal work, that is, show up in some workplace in case some actual work needs to be done which sometimes happens. That’s the typical office admin job in a nutshell.
Relationship dramas are so enormously popular because people simply never experience any other problems.
Would you mind detailing your circumstances at the time, did you and your other half require high end full time jobs to finance the home you must have purchased? Did childcare cost the equivelance of £2000 a month which is 2/3rds of one of those full time salaries? what was the price of gas and electricity? fuel and materials?
Sorry but the boomers just don’t live in todays world, just because technology was more primitive doesn’t change anything as your own parents lived in a more primitive world.
We didn’t eat out when we bought our first home in the late 70s. And that was just before they, more or less, doubled in price within two years. Yet those without a mortgage could still afford to eat out!
How old where you when you bought this home, how much did you earn? Did it take two full time incomes to support and total x4.5 your joint annual income if both worked?
It is about money. House prices are set by supply and demand and according to what the banks offer to mortgagees, based on two above median incomes. Cut the size and availability of mortgages and house prices would come down (and the banks’ profits would decrease). With more women ranking up student debt and struggling to make headway in their careers, starting a family gets delayed.
Completely agree with this. Banks make a bloody killing from exorbitant house prices. It stands to reason that they would use every ounce of their influence and power to keep house prices high. They don’t care about social responsibility. Why would they? If every now and then someone loses their home through default, and the bank makes a loss, this loss is more than made up from the huge profits made from those who don’t default. It’s one of the ugly faces of capitalism.
As they say, follow the money and you end up at the reason why we are all being shafted. This applies to everything in life.
How do banks “make a killing” from high house prices?
They make their money on the difference in interest rates between money they pay to depositors – or borrow from the money market – and the interest rates on loans, less their expenses.
High house prices are the result of Government caused monetary inflation. High house prices mean fewer borrowers, more loan defaults, mortgage repayments are inflated away compared to value of money loaned at start of a mortgage.
How is that helping banks?
Banks do make a killing due to fractional reserve lending. Every pound deposited with them is lent out up to thirty times over – at higher interest rates than those paid to depositors. Banks offer higher mortgages because they get higher income. Those higher mortgages encourage borrowers to pay more for housing stock, but as they’re in competition with each other and effectively having equivalent purchasing power all that happens is they compete for the same houses as if were mortgages lower, but paying more to the banks.
Women (some woman at least) demanded that their income was as eligible as their husband’s when calculating a mortgage.
And the Banks weren’t allowed to be sexist.
Supply/demand/price mechanism only works in a free market economy. The housing sector is not a free market, it is distorted by Government: regulation, manipulation of interest rates to create economic booms to increase tax yields, causing monetary inflation, stamp duty, subsidised loans.
In fact we don’t have a free market economy at all, thanks in large measure to being tethered to the Red Tape capital of the Galaxy, the EU and its European Commission in Brussels.
My ex and I had four, 1975 to 1983. Very low salary. Hard, we were paupers, but we both wanted a large family and one early. Seven years after the last was born before we even managed a camping holiday.
Regrets?
None. And a bonus – many years to enjoy my grandchildren.
First paragraph: people previously didn’t do the things you mention because they were saving to buy a house, furnishing it and start a family.
That for most people nowadays because of over 50 years engineered inflation, is not possible so they spend their money on other things.
Years ago people could afford essentials but not luxuries, today people can afford luxuries but not essentials.
The fault? Successive Governments – and a greedy population voting for them – since the war borrowing and printing money, pumping it into the economy causing inflation to pay for an unaffordable, expanding welfare-state and NHS, lots of “free stuff” for everybody, and an increasing number of civil servants in bloated Government to administer it all.
Sorry, but that’s a load of rubbish.
Food and clothing has never been more affordable.
I’m not saying there aren’t people who struggle. But the number who struggle to feed and clothe themselves is vanishingly small. Less than ever.
The psychology of it is that for many young people who are often single – marriage having fallen out of fashion and online dating meaning a decline in men wanting commitment- they can never, ever afford to buy a property so they spend their money on other things. Saving for deposit is pointless because a single person cannot afford mortgage repayments for a shoebox on the average wage of just over £30k. The world has totally changed from when we boomers were starting out. It’s not fecklessness, it’s a different world.
There’s a decline in men wanting commitment because of what they would have to commit to, and who they would commit to.
Very sad indeed.
Thank you, for being a boomer who can see the world today.
You are wrong there mate. You are going back to 80 years with your argument. People long before the war and before that had big family’s, but this was the norm back then. They did not have television’s, computers, freezers, fridges, cars and 2 holidays abroad back then. ——So it is true that if you went without all of that you might be better able to afford 5 children, but why would they do that? All the modern technologies and having a car have to be funded as well, so economics is clearly is a major factor.
I’ve said as much before: Buying and furnishing a property always used to be a team effort. The team comprising not only the couple (usually) who intend to live there and pay the mortgage but their parents who by some weird coincidence decide that now is the time to get a new sofa or curtains or washing machine or whatever.
That was exactly my experience in my first house. Every item was a hand me down that I had stored in my parents garage until I finally moved into my first home, a one bedroom house in the corner of a block of six. No gas, no central heating. I worked three jobs to save up for the deposit and legal fees, my primary job being in a bank branch. I didn’t qualify for a mortgage from my employer so had a building society mortgage, who were willing to advance a higher repayment to salary. I didn’t have foreign holidays (or any holidays), coffee shops didn’t exist and nor did mobile phone contracts. The home was not in a property hot spot but a poorer town in the west of England. Even with house price inflation, anyone doing the equivalent job I was doing, with starter house prices below £150k in rural England would be able to get on the ladder, as I did, with sensible saving. After a few years and meeting a partner, they might find that merging their two small homes into one is an easier transition than what many seem to want, namely a three or… Read more »
Isn’t it interesting how so many people focus on *women* and blame us for the state of birth rates across the West ( no surprises at all that Joanna Gray would also take this angle ), as if the men are all chasing women going ”I want to make a baby with you” and women are all responding ”No, no, no. Take a hike!”, rather than posing the question as it should be framed: Why are adults not having babies? Emphasis on BOTH males and females. Here’s some interesting research from the Pew Research Center in the US from 2024, in which they survey both men and women of different age groups; ”Among U.S. adults who don’t have children, those ages 50 and older have mixed views on whether they ever wanted to have them in the first place. And their reasons for never having kids differ from those given by younger adults who say they’re unlikely to have them. The top reason cited by those ages 50 and older is that it just never happened. Adults ages 18 to 49 are most likely to say they just don’t want to have children. These younger adults are also more likely than those… Read more »
Yes, I think your analysis is correct.
A lot of women just don’t want to have children. It’s almost like the instinct of the survival of the species is gone.
Also, perhaps part of the overall picture is the mental state of the current generation, especially the educated ones: inward looking, obsessed with itself, filled with anxiety, depressed, often narcissistic, risk-averse. Looking at them, they just don’t seem capable of venturing outside the cage they live in. And having children is certainly an adventure. (By the way, I’m 59 and a father of two.)
Perhaps we have reached the state of “mouse utopia” (for those who are not familiar, see YouTube…).
It’s Pew’s analysis, not mine.
“A lot of women just don’t want to have children.”
And had you read what I shared you’d see it’s *both* men and women that don’t want children at almost equal rates.
OK, fair enough.
Yes, it’s Pew’s analysis but you presented it here and I assumed that was because you fundamentally agreed with it.
Yes, of course it’s both men and women. But usually the woman makes the decision. If a woman really wants to have a baby, she can usually make it happen.
(By the way, I don’t quite understand your hostility – I think your comment was good, valuable and insightful.)
What “hostility”? I’m a plain-speaking person who won’t be held responsible for how over-senstitive men interpret the delivery of my comments. Your original response to my post sounded very much like you hadn’t even read the excerpt I shared, let alone clicked on the link, and even sounded like you were misrepresenting what I posted. Once again, there’s the overall compulsion by many on here to turn this topic into the usual divisive blame game. Whereas had you read the article by Pew you’d see the reasons stated by adults of both sexes as to why they never did or never plan to have kids.
I’d say the only real difference is within certain age groups, not so much between the sexes. You can see that the younger cohort tend to be more captured and influenced by the circulating ideologies being pushed, such as the climate hoax, as opposed to the >50 group, for instance.
Yes, I think we have reached mouse utopia.
like the mice you refer too, withdrawal, preening and self grooming seem to be the option people are choosing now.
Tradition was that the women were homemakers, but now there’s no tradition. And men, in their mid or late 20s, or even 30s, are in a strange, unfamiliar place.
Something else which is seldom talked about as to why there’s a drop in births nowadays compared to decades/centuries gone by is that both men and women ( at least those who don’t belong to orthodox religions ) are not duty-bound to breed. I sometimes wonder, due to the social conventions, restrictions and general expectations placed on women in the past, how many even wanted children in the first place. But men too. If you imagine how many men are openly gay now, think how it must’ve been years ago when it was actually a criminal offence. I expect many men lived double lives and under the pretence that they were happily married to a woman, social norms dictated you had to produce kids as a byproduct of marriage, but all the time they were living as repressed homosexuals. Women too, of course, though I’m not sure if criminal prosecutions were the same for lesbians. But these people certainly couldn’t live freely or be their authentic selves. The stigma attached, also. Not just the legal aspect but they’d risk being ostracised from society if they came out to family. A complete contrast with how things are nowadays where most people… Read more »
This is surely right. Motherhood is no longer prized – but neither is fatherhood. Why not? We eschew the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. But, again, why? The world is no longer seen as the creation of a loving God but as a prison from which there is no escape, only a more or less bearable existence within. Welcome to the gnostic universe.
It’s worse than that.
For some time now kids have systematically been taught that humans are the scourge of planet Earth. We pollute, we destroy the climate, we make species go extinct. Mother Earth is barely clinging on because of us horrible humans and the fewer of us there are the better. That is the overriding message kids have been receiving and continue to receive from the sociopaths and their moronic unwitting accomplices that run our education system.
Yes, our species is being taught to hate itself. How can anyone exposed to this constant denigration manage to overcome that and want to perpetuate the species responsible?
Exactly right. Not wishing to belittle the difficulties caused by runaway asset inflation and money printing but this is also tied in with loss of faith. Our forebears, and those in traditional Christian and Muslim cultures today, were much more inclined to trust in God to provide and expected life to be hard. Dare one guess they were generally happier?! Of course ready access to contraception and abortion have changed everything but IMHO these things are intrinsically repugnant until people are gradually persuaded they are OK. Then narcissism takes over and our collective greed just grows.
Of course not wishing to underestimate the terrible problems we boomers have handed down to younger generations.
On the economic side I’m surprised more mention isn’t made of the effects of housing benefit in inflating rents and asset prices. The enormous growth of the welfare state is another aspect of moral decline.
Right, that’s my old geezer’s rant to start the week.
“Of course ready access to contraception and abortion have changed everything but IMHO these things are intrinsically repugnant until people are gradually persuaded they are OK.”
If females don’t act responsibly and start on some form of contraception when they become sexually active then you’ll get more unwanted pregnancies, therefore more abortions will be the result. Men/teens have demonstrated how unreliable they often are in behaving responsibly and wearing a condom. So if you’re against abortion I fail to see why you’d be against women being in control of their own reproduction and, consequently, their lives.
People have sex for pleasure, given it is a perfectly normal part of human behaviour, not just with the aim of procreating, you know. Your above statement reads quite contradictory to me.
Thanks for your comment. I see the penny hasn’t dropped for you that sex is not compulsory! It didn’t drop for me until my fifties when I realised how much suffering I’d caused and witnessed by buying into the lies of the sexual revolution. So according to traditional Christian morality (to which I now subscribe) acting responsibly means not having sex outside of marriage. It’s very simple and not that difficult once people learn to ignore the propaganda. The acceptance of what used to be called promiscuity has hardly led to a happier society. The widespread use of artificial contraception has actually led to a huge increase in abortion, which is nothing less than taking the life of an innocent and defenceless human being in development. Just look at these scans of unborn children only a few weeks old in the womb with beating hearts, fingernails, pain responses etc. You have to be pretty desensitised to think that destroying this life is just normal “health care”. Just because something like sex is enjoyable doesn’t make it always appropriate. One of the few nice things happening today is that many young people are discovering the wisdom of Christian morality in spite… Read more »
I think sex wasn’t “compulsory” for women from the early 1990s, when rape within marriage was criminalised. As I’m not a Christian I don’t subscribe to your rigid views. Rather, as a realist, I can state the fact that one doesn’t need to be promiscuous in order to have sex outside of marriage. It’s really very easy to have a partner and enjoy a monogamous relationship with just the one person you have an emotional connection to. A bit of self-control, along with a generous helping of self-respect, goes a long way. It’s actually considered perfectly normal and acceptable in this century.
If you can provide a source to support your assertion that the use of birth control has “led to a huge increase in abortion”, that would be helpful.
We’re all entitled to our views though I’m not sure yours are any less rigid than mine. Off the top of my head I don’t have any actual statistics ( though it wouldn’t be hard to find them) but are you really doubting that there has not been a massive increase in abortions in the UK since the 60s? It’s estimated that one in three pregnancies is now aborted and the the fall in the birth rate to below replacement has to be linked. And please don’t go on about backstreet abortions because they were on nowhere like the same scale. The plain fact is, for obvious reasons, the increase in use of contraception made casual sex and “committed” sex outside martiage much easier and then socially acceptable. The link with procreation got obscured and as no form of contraception is totally reliable there ended up being more unwanted pregnancies. To which there was one simple but horrendous solution. As a realist I now observe that the normalisation of casual and/or extra marital sex has led to the degrading of relationships between the sexes, an increase in single parenthood and broken families, huge levels of pornography, lots of anxious people… Read more »
Absolutely correct.
Sex is a Soul Trap, and that’s why Satan wants the whole world to be obsessed with Sex.
Stated like the incel you so obviously are.😏
Well and bravely said, sir! It is about Christian morality, which has been almost totally undermined and destroyed by PORNOGRAPHY. As one Heroic Jewish man admitted, Jews have long been in control of the porn industry because of their “Atavistic Hatred of Christian Morality”.
Professor J. D. Abrams is his name, now at Bangor University in Wales. See his courageously honest research article:
“Porn Again Jews: Jewish Involvement in the Adult Film Industry.” – Bangor University
The very best place to find the truth about Judaism is to listen to the few truly Heroic Jewish people who courageously tell the truth about Judaism to the world, even though the world, and especially Christians, rarely believe them. These Heroic Jews are risking everything to help Christians understand, but Christians close their hearts and minds, instead of listening to these messengers.
The List of Honour of Heroic Jews must include Dr. Henry Makow, Brother Nathanael, Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, as well as Professor N. D. Abrams, now at Bangor University in Wales.
Those gnostics knew a thing or two!
Back in the 1970s, when reading a copy of the feminist magazine ‘Spare Rib’, I realised that feminism was full of hatred for men. In the early 1990s, whist trying to find a decent exposition of feminism, basd upon reasoned argument and good evidence, I also came to realise that feminism also had hatred for women, motherhood and the feminine. Various feminist authors also seemed to be struggling with self-hatred.
In contrast, the clinician John Bowlby, with his development of ‘attachment theory’, clearly showed the importance of good mothering (and fathering) of children, for their emotional well-being and ability to form good relationships later on. It is vital for children that they develop ‘secure attachments’ with their mother and father.
Also, having most women competing with men for jobs will inevitably lower wages below what they would be otherwise, leading to less purchasing power.
Personally, I know someone who gave up a successful career as an opera singer, when she was ‘hitting the big time’, because she preferred to be home and have a family. As I understand it, she has not regretted this decision.
When my parents married in 1950, my mother was obliged to give up work as society then expected my father to support her and any children. They raised 2 children on one salary, it was only when I started full time school in the late 1960s that my mother took a job as a dinner lady to boost the family income a little which by then was becoming socially acceptable.
That was perfectly normal in the 1950s, when I grew up. It’s now impossibe on an average salary… an enormous social change which, until fairly recently, seemed to pass un-noticed,
Too right. Louise Perry is actually pretty good on most of this stuff.
Why are houses so much more expensive? How about importing over 2 million people over the last decade? Nothing highlights this more than building new council houses and handing them straight to the illegal immigrant scum. Allowing the universities to grow – for no obvious benefit – has eaten up a lot of housing with all and sundry leaving home to go to uni.
Another elephant in the room. It’s taboo to make this obvious correlation in polite company!
Feminisation of every aspect of modern society has unintended (possibly intended?) consequences, this is one of them.
Feminism did not revere womanhood or motherhood. Instead it coveted mens lives.
Ain’t that the truth!
60 years of propaganda telling women their social/biological/evolutionary function is not wife and mother but career gal doing men’s jobs (but only if professional and well paid), and no need to find a good husband, get married, raise a family.
Career women then delay marriage or start a family until 30s, but women are most fertile in the range 15 to 21, so chances of conception and carrying pregnancy to term diminishes into 30s and 40s. Child rearing is exhausting and 30/40 year olds don’t have the energy of women in their 20s, so disincentive to have more than one or two.
Some career women decide not to have children.
Men who can’t find a partner with whom to settle down because they are career women, live a great life as a singleton. Giving this up in the 30s, 40s to start a family is difficult.
Then there are the financial aspects whereby young people see not possibility of being able to buy their first home.
What’s the mystery?
House prices are the main barrier to starting a family. When interest rates tumble, the cost of borrowing falls, making it easier to borrow more… so house prices rise to absorb all the available money. Then interest rates rise – but the debt remains at the inflated level.
Along with student debts, part of a trend to make us a nation of debtors.
“….mortgages and morality account for most of it…”. True, but they’re simply predictable outputs from the machine. It’s the machines relentless pursuit of ‘progress’ that causes these symptoms. The machine needs diehard ideologues to continue its advance. Most importantly, it needs the Marxist cult of feminism and all who sail with her to persuade millions of women to be manipulated to believe that they don’t want children. When childless lives then become exposed as the utterly meaningless existence it is, it then needs a special sort of programmed woman to continue the machines advance – step forward the women who cannot accept responsibility for anything, literally anything. These state bots will point at everyone, usually men, to explain why they haven’t had children, but never themselves. Never. The machine feeds on these logic-free narcissists more than it feeds on anything else.
Interesting photo. The wife and kids are all really beautiful, looking genuinely happy and relaxed. The husband and presumably breadwinner looks like he’s trying hard to look happy, while stressed and as tense as a coiled spring inside, bearing a huge burden of responsibility for them all. Just my impression…
There’s another factor not mentioned in this article which surprises me considering the world has just endured the worst global health disaster in living memory, namely the obligatory experimental vaccination of more the 5 billion people for an illness with an infection rate lower than seasonal flu. The mRNA injections were never safe or effective but the consequences of taking them ranged from mild to severe and were certainly life damaging. Infertility being one of them.
Best and most enjoyable thing I ever did – looking after my children and now, grandchildren. I gave up a professional career to do so – thankfully it was affordable – but my daughters don’t have that luxury. The depression of wages brought about by mass immigration has ensured that salaries have not kept pace with inflation so the fathers cannot support a family on their earnings alone. Similarly the cost of housing has risen exponentially. All deliberate government policy – and offering free childcare – soviet style – so children can be dumped in nurseries and their bond of family dissolved earlier and earlier.
Infertility in the UK is obviously linked to the C19 injections as well. All part of the indigenous depopulation agenda.
https://x.com/NicHulscher/status/2007150684043657663?s=20
There is a strong decrease in fertility adding to the problem. Some of this is caused by wireless radiation from smart devices etc. A recent WHO review was corrected to say, “From experimental animal studies there is high certainty of evidence that RF-EMF exposure reduces rate of pregnancy…”
I have not read the article yet but I would suggest not having children is 99% an economic decision. —–THEY CANNOT AFFORD IT. ——Here is an idea. Give massive tax relief for people to have children and it will kill two birds with one stone. —-(1) More British Children, and (2) Less Mass Migration.
Several things. First, the generation just before me did not have the Pill. People five years older than me got married right out of university and had their first kids in their early 20s, because if you wanted to have sex, you were going to get pregnancy so that was what you had to do. Making reproduction a choice was the first step to aq collapse in the birthrate. . What young woman will knowingly wreck her figure and take on the responsibilities of motherhood in her 20s, if she can prevent it? Second, life back when I was young made far fewer demands on the purse. TV was sort of free apart from the licence fee and there were no mobile phones or personal computers. There were no foreign holidays either. I remember the first package trip to Spain was in 1973. You went camping. You took day trips from home. You only had two weeks leave a year anyway and wouldn’t know what to do with more. People didn’t have gym memberships. That started in the 80s. Food, drink and clothing was pretty much it. Plus the taxman took far less. My first annual wage was £1,400. Higher… Read more »
Not sure how old you are, but the pill has been out for over 40/50 years.
77
Having read these comments and quite frankly a very biased article, I wonder how many of you believe you actually got here?, all seem to be under the illusion that us “oldies” had it so easier, but forget that wages were much lower, so yes house prices were, but you haven’t had 17.5% mortgages, 3 day working weeks, mass unemployment to mention but a few, the difference is, we started in back to backs, then when we had children we moved to either thru terrace or semi, we didn’t have to have flash cars, we didnt have to have foreign holidays, latest gadgets, mobile phones etc, we had our family and our homes, meant more than a large salary. The main reason women dont have children today is because its all want, want, want and selfishness on the part of the “high flyers” and they prefer to leave it to the people they feel “lesser” than them, ie those in menial jobs etc.
Surely the reducing fertility of men is another factor – partly brought on by the amount of female hormones, estrogen, in the water from women taking ‘the pill’
There are so many factors. But the damage has been done, and increasing migration out of Africa (where growth is most numerous) will be a major event in the world for the rest of our lifetimes.
Born in the 1940s, we married at 20; I milked cows in very rural Lincolnshire and had a very poor house with the job and 150 miles from any relatives. Child at 22 and my wife looked after me and the baby and did not go to work and we were very poor but happy. No meals out, no pubs, no holidays and a motorbike. Still married 58 years later but managed to start buying a very cheap cottage in our 40s in rural Scotland while still living in a tied house and subsequently moved 3 times upgrading each time as I did all the improvements and now retired with no mortgage.
Could we do the same now – of course, but it requires self sacrifice and a strong Christian marriage and total commitment. Have our young people nowadays the same self discipline and work ethic?