Forget women, it’s men who are leaving it too late to have babies
Women are leaving it too late to have children, the headlines chide. Women are prioritising career over kids, the experts warn. Women are… only half of the story, actually. Last time I looked it takes two to make a baby. Three if you count the IVF doctor. An entire village if you include the backroom staff and the softly spoken nurse who calls you up to tell you that after all the hope, prayers and injections, there will be no baby, not this time.
Both my girls are miracles of IVF – one in my mid 30s, the other in my early 40s. Neither a cheap nor an easy option. Results are not guaranteed but it’s a booming industry nevertheless because – and women can never hear this enough – we are foolishly putting off starting a family.
New figures from the independent regulator the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority reveal that the average age of first-time fertility-treatment patients has risen to over 35 for the first time. This is not a welcome trend. Data shows that IVF results in pregnancy in 42 per cent of cases for women aged 18-34, but drops to 26 per cent for those in their late 30s, and plunges to just 5 per cent in the early 40s.
I always knew I would have difficulties conceiving. My husband didn’t. Like a lot of men, he wasn’t particularly interested in starting a family, but as I wanted it enough for both of us and he wanted me to be happy, it was settled.
Here, too, I count myself lucky. Two decades on, I see increasing numbers of men past 35 refusing to grow up and take responsibility, kicking the prospect of fatherhood into the long grass as their partners’ biological clocks run down.
There they are, dressed in the latest Gen Z trainers, clinging to the myth of perpetual boyhood even as their hairlines recede. Their hipster beards are flecked with grey and they can’t quite keep up with their younger five-a-side football teammates.
Plenty of time for them to drop a sprog. Look at Al Pacino fathering a son last year at the age of 83 with his 29-year-old partner. Hoo-ah! No rush. But exceptions don’t make rules.
I genuinely don’t understand why public-health campaigns don’t lay off women for a bit and instead urge their reproductive refusenik partners to start a family sooner.
Leonardo DiCaprio, 49, is widely mocked and accused of being sleazy for supposedly never dating any women over the age of 25. But at least that means they are in their mid-20s, the age where a woman typically wants to settle down, so his breaking things off gives her a chance to find “the one”. Not all men are so accommodating.
“I feel blind fury when I think about how my ex led me on,” says my friend, let’s call her Jo. “Every so often I’d bring up the subject of kids and he’d reassure me that he wanted ‘at least’ three when the time was right. But the time never was right.”
The couple were together for eight years. Finally, in a moment of utter exasperation, Jo issued her partner with a “now or never” ultimatum. She was 35. He was 37.
“He walked away. Just as simple as that,” she says. “I was left feeling heartbroken and betrayed. He was my best chance of getting pregnant but he was too weak or selfish to finish the relationship sooner and stop wasting my time. I had a mini-breakdown when I heard he had a baby almost immediately with his next girlfriend. It turns out he did want children, just not with me.”
Jo’s story isn’t unique. According to research by the University of Bath, these days almost one in five women are reaching midlife without children. For women born in the 1970s, it is thought that one in four will reach 45 without giving birth – the vast majority of these are childless by circumstance, not through choice.
Jo, who is now 54, had no children of her own, though she is now stepmum to her much older husband’s adult children. “There’s a hole deep inside me, filled with grief and anger,” she says. “I try not to think about the babies I never had, but every so often the emotions bubble up.”
Our culture encourages – lionises – youthfulness in men as well as women, but it’s impossible to mask the physiological effects of ageing. And however firm the six-pack, biology militates against men delaying fatherhood.
A birth registry study of nearly two million children in Denmark has found that a certain kind of childhood leukaemia increases in likelihood by 13 per cent for every five years older the father is. Men who are aged 40 and over are almost six times more likely to have a child with autism. Babies born to fathers aged over 50, face as much as a fivefold-increased risk of schizophrenia. And obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD, bipolar disorder – all are more likely, research indicates, if the father is older. A quick straw poll reveals that not a single man I know is aware of this – any of it.
Birth rates are plunging throughout the developed world. Here in Britain, the lack of affordable housing and high childcare costs have led couples to defer parenthood – will this government give them a helping hand?
Office for National Statistics figures from 2022 show that in 1971, just 18 per cent of 30-year-olds had no children – today that figure has risen to 50 per cent. While there are sisters doing it for themselves – 3,548 single women underwent IVF alone in just the last year, an 82 per cent increase on the figure from 2019 – most IVF patients are heterosexual couples.
But the greatest asset in fertility is age; younger women have higher-quality eggs. Younger men have more motile sperm.
As a society we need to start having babies sooner, which reduces the need for intervention. Perhaps it’s time to rebrand fatherhood not as a midlife inevitability but as a virile rite of passage by putting the sex back into sexual reproduction.