You don’t have to be a hardline pronatalist like Elon Musk to know that we are in a global fertility crisis. Across nations and continents, birth rates are at record lows. In the UK, the rate has dropped to 1.39 per woman, a decline that is reflected globally. When it comes to declining populations, “only the Black Death in the fourteenth century,” writes Camilla Cavendish in her new book, Generation Maybe, “is comparable to what is happening now.”
There are a number of reasons for this, of course, all explored thoroughly by Cavendish, a Financial Times columnist and former policy director for David Cameron’s government who has also probed the problems of the ageing global population in her 2019 book Extra Time.
Generation Maybe is thus named because we don’t yet know for sure if millennials and Generation Z are, in fact, having fewer babies, or if they are simply waiting longer to do so: many young people report being undecided, and a combination of factors – including more people attending higher education and increased financial instability – means people are generally settling down later.
Similarly, the generational ambivalence or negativity towards starting a family can stem from not wanting to bring children into an unstable or difficult world (I know this to be true among my own friends who have decided against it). And then there are those who want to have children but simply haven’t found the right person to do it with, which Cavendish calls the “relationship crisis”.
Elon Musk is a pronatalist and has 14 known children by different women (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP)Cavendish thoroughly interrogates the modern global landscape for the reasons for the fertility crash, as well as exploring the myriad options for those hoping to have children in an unconventional way. She looks at why there are more only children than ever, why women are waiting until they’re older, why lower-income men are now the least fertile demographic and how countries are balancing out the baby deficit with community schemes such as a “chosen grandparents” set-up in Berlin or policy incentives in parts of Japan and Hungary.
Throughout it all, the heat of the issue is clear: the critics of those who choose not to become parents “portray them as shallow, immature hedonists”, while those who do can be blasted for their “self-indulgent lifestyle choice”. What Cavendish makes clear is that while neither decision is wrong, the trend towards childlessness has an enormous impact on the structure of society.
There is a lot to take in. But among all the data, it’s the zoomed-out perspective that proves the most fascinating: all of this is happening in a hyper-individualist climate in which we are under pressure to make the correct choices and optimise our lives.
The question of children has – as Musk proves – become a dividing line between progressives and conservatives. Cavendish finds that the reasons for declining fertility are not as firmly rooted in “female empowerment” as she initially thought – but there is undoubtedly a sense among young women that we “should” aspire to more than motherhood.
No matter how much you insist that it is your choice to have children, in an “empowered” world where women can also be the breadwinners, you may be met with scepticism. At the same time, conservatives frown upon women who eschew children in favour of their careers – take US Senator JD Vance’s jibe at “childless cat ladies”.
Author Camilla Cavendish is a former policy director for David Cameron’s governmentYet it’s all less about left and right and more about the contradictions of a liberal society. On the one hand, we have boundless choice – causing hand-wringing and overthinking for individuals who want to make sure they’re doing the right thing.
Where previously people would have cracked on unthinkingly with marrying and reproducing, perhaps resulting in great unhappiness, now it is, as Cavendish puts it, a “fraught and conscious choice”, with people increasingly worried about how to balance their desire for a family with “the desire for self-fulfilment”. And, in modern life, when there is a decision to be made, there is both infinite information with which to make it and an immense pressure to get it right.
In a culture where the self is privileged above all else, parenthood is particularly loaded: the biggest fear of many parents, particularly mothers, is, Cavendish notes, losing their sense of self. In recent years there has been much more conversation about the difficulties of being a mother: young women “look at my generation,” writes Cavendish, who is in her fifties, “and see the haggard products of exhaustion and guilt, the living embodiment of the truth that you cannot ‘have it all’.”
The expectation that women should try, regardless, to have it all is partly because of the pressures for new parents to return to work quickly, which come both from policy (here in the UK, the incentive of tax-free childcare) and social pressure: Cavendish interviews several women worried about the “dead time” that would appear on their CVs if they took time out to raise a child (a feat that looks all the more difficult when we apply similarly perfectionist standards to “parenting”, which, Cavendish points out, only became a verb somewhere around 1980). That being a parent now feels like another full-time job to excel at, rather than a role to be worn lightly, adds significant pressure.
Cavendish points out that normalising the fact that motherhood can be difficult can tip into fearmongering: headlines that scream how children ruin your marriage, your body and your mental health hardly acknowledge the personal benefits – not to mention societal and existential necessity – of procreating. Yet when we increasingly expect our experience of life to be smoothed out, avoiding discomfort or friction wherever possible, it is hard to frame an undoubtedly challenging experience as appealing. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate not to want to have children – but a lot of uncertainty seems to stem from the modern quest to find an option with no downside.
All women’s experiences have to be acceptable: to want them and not have them, to have them and not want them, to have them and want them, not to want them at all. But the reality is that the rate at which fertility is declining is causing significant problems – and that those problems make it self-perpetuating. Those opting not to have kids, or to stop at one, because they can’t afford it are only going to double down when their taxes are raised, interest rates increase and housing becomes more expensive as a result of the ageing population. It’s a vicious cycle.
Globalisation and individualism have created a world where anything seems possible. This is no more apparent than in the fertility industry, where men and women of almost any age or nationality can buy themselves time and choice using extraordinary biotechnology. In a liberal society, it is draconian to shout about how women should have more babies, or that they shouldn’t. But Cavendish is clear: sooner or later, the baby bust will have consequences beyond our own personal happiness.
‘Generation Maybe’ by Camilla Cavendish is published by Bodley Head, £25
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