When thirty-something stoner yoga teacher Eden becomes accidentally pregnant after a one-night stand in feminist buddy comedy Babes, the concept of motherhood seems wildly out of her comfort zone. Eden is self-employed, has no familial support, and her idea of a well-balanced meal is psychedelic mushrooms on toast. Can she pull this off? The film, starring and co-written by Broad City’s Ilana Glazer following her own motherhood journey, sees Eden’s values and friendships put to the test. When she finally gives birth, she almost can’t believe it: “How are we not talking about this all the time? We grow bodies inside of our bodies. What the f***?”
The plot device of the unexpected pregnancy has always been a popular trope in pop culture, owing part of its pull to the increasing difficulty of making the choice whether or not to have children. Think Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, Hannah Horvath in Girls, Miranda in Sex and the City, Rachel in Friends. These depictions often use babies as the conduit for an emotional maturation storyline – the unplanned baby signaling the protagonists’ forced evolution into adulthood. At the same time, they reveal just how anxiety-provoking the active choice whether or not to have a child has become.
Off screen, the scripts that define adult flourishing — spending plenty of time in your twenties and thirties to establish yourself professionally and financially and to find personal fulfilment; vetting a large applicant pool for the best romantic match and slowly cultivating a stable, loving relationship – increasingly leave out starting a family. Often, they paint it as a hindrance to success or something to consider once a certain level of success has been realised, and always an unnerving risk. At the same time, an atmosphere of economic uncertainty, a pandemic hangover and climate crisis, have rendered the question of whether or not to have children more charged than ever, both personally and politically. And the longer we hold out on thinking about whether we want a family, the riskier it can feel: the decision looms as a massive unknown, a choice that will overturn, if not erase, the identities and careers we’ve fought so hard to establish and that feel so tenuous and fragile.
People are waiting longer to start families and are having fewer children than any previous generation before them. Since 2010, birth rates have been steadily declining in the UK, this week falling to the lowest in 50 years. Women here are now expected to have 1.49 children in their lifetimes, well below the threshold of 2.1 that is required to sustain the population long term. The average age of a first-time mother in the UK peaked at 30.9 in 2021, the oldest since records began in 1938. Rates of childlessness are up: one in five women over the age of 45 in the UK now has no children, whether by choice or circumstance. The phenomenon is global: across developed nations, fertility rates have halved since the 1960s, and demographers say there’s no indication these deficits will be made up over time.
Men, meanwhile, are panicking. The Office for Budget Responsibility recently announced that the UK’s finances were on an “unsustainable” path, in no small part due to the U.K.’s ageing population. Prime minister Keir Starmer has so far ruled out enacting any specific policies to encourage people to have children, but other nations like South Korea and Hungary are desperately implementing measures to fight their declining birth rates.
Of course, we aren’t the first generation to face economic hardship or challenging circumstances. So why are so many of us hesitating to have kids, or choosing to have none at all? Conversations around shortages of good men; the burning planet and the cost of having kids loom large. (Some activists have gone so far as to call children a “luxury good”, pointing to the high cost of housing and childcare as a source of the fertility decline). Matters surely aren’t helped by the fact that childcare costs in the UK are among the highest in the world and parental leave still leaves much to be desired. (Not only are mothers only guaranteed six weeks of adequate pay on maternity leave, but fathers are also eligible for a mere one to two weeks of paid leave per child.)
What’s more, in some corners, society itself has become increasingly hostile to family life. Consider the addled parents who feel compelled to pass out goody bags on plane rides to preemptively apologise for their infants’ presence, or the rising demand for child-free public spaces. It’s hardly surprising, then, that so many parents report feeling isolated and lonely today. At the same time, it is important to remember that not only have children always been resource-intensive and having them has always meant opening ourselves up to risk and sacrifice, but that even in countries with far more social support and financial incentives for parents than the UK, birth rates are also dwindling.
Some have suggested that millennials and Gen Zers are having fewer babies because they’re choosing to defer adulthood in favour of an extended, interminable adolescence. Add it to the list of other ills we are blamed for (spending too much on avocado toast or Netflix subscriptions to buy a flat, for one). But this caricature isn’t just lazy, it’s wrong. When it comes to starting a family, millennials are not frivolous, rather they are holding themselves up to increasingly hard to reach standards of maturity, seeking to hit all the traditional markers of adulthood well before they are able to even contemplate the possibility of children. This is, in no small part, because we came of age during a global economic recession, which made those markers—a house and a stable career—harder to hit in one’s twenties than they were for our parents or grandparents. And while many millennials have since caught up materially with previous generations, the mood of precarity still hangs overhead.
With all this to contend with, is it any wonder so many women are torn about whether they want children? Or that even those who lean in their favour can find themselves struggling to fulfil the desire? When it comes to dating, pressure to be the ‘cool girl’ encourages us never to mention our hopes for a family in case it freaks out our dates. Men, meanwhile, often enjoy the luxury of passing the buck of this enormous life-altering choice, as if it’s a women’s issue alone—despite the fact that they have ticking biological clocks, too, and that the shape of their adult lives is no less at stake. Exempting themselves from having to think about starting a family not only makes men potentially worse partners but, in alienating them from one of life’s greatest decisions, does them a serious disservice, as well.
So, what can be done? We can, and should, agitate for more social support for women, children and families of every stripe in our workplaces and government policies. And we can be equally proactive in our personal lives. We should refuse to shoulder the burden of the Kids Question on our own: raising the question of children early in romantic relationships should be as appropriate as sharing one’s taste in music and leisure preferences.
We should also demand far more investment into researching and treating female health. At the same time, we ought to continue to educate ourselves about our fertility—and what reproductive technologies can and cannot do to affect it—as we do about sex, orgasms, and contraception. These include the biological facts that reproductive tech entrepreneurs, who profit off the promise of false security, would prefer we not think about. It’s only in the light of this knowledge that women—and men—can freely determine the course of their lives. Above all, we should make room for discussions of the role children could and should play in our lives—in our romantic relationships, in our careers, and in the public sphere.
While we might find ourselves fantasising about spontaneous pregnancies—how freeing it would be to rid ourselves of the anxieties, challenges and obstacles of an active choice—ultimately, it’s up to us, collectively, to make sure that whatever our decision ends up being, whether yes or no, it is wholeheartedly ours.
What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice, by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman is out now.
