Hello, I'm Katya Adler, from the BBC World Service this is The Global Story.
Around the world, women are having fewer babies and mothers are getting older and
older. More women are having children in their 40s, their 50s and even in their 60s and 70s.
Last week we successfully delivered this lady, 70 years of age, of twins, boy and girl. Previously,
we had treated her with IVF, again the same process, three years ago,
and she conceived and delivered a baby girl. Today we're asking why are women choosing to
have babies later in life and what are the consequences for all of us?
With me today is the BBC's Population Correspondent, Stephanie Hegarty.
Hi Stephanie. Hi.
And also, Professor Joyce Harper, she heads up the Reproductive Science and Society Group at UCL's
Institute for Women's Health. Hello.
So, let's start since we're talking about older mums, I think we're all older mums
here. I mean I had my first child at 36 and my third at 42 and I was half laughing,
and half horrified at being referred to already with my first child as a geriatric mum.
You know what, I was delighted that that never, I had my first child last year at 30... was I
37 but nearly 38, and I was delighted that that never came up, because I scoured the
documents I was given by the NHS to see if I was being referred to as a geriatric mother.
I think it might have changed recently. I had my first at 39, so yeah, and no one
said it to me, but then I'm in the field. I don't think they'd have dared say that.
They were scared of you. I think so.
Yeah, I'd like to start off very much by what do we mean by an older mum? And again, you know,
speaking from our own personal experience, not wanting to offend anybody, but how old
Joyce is an older, we won't say old, mum? I would certainly never put a number on it,
but the term geriatric mother did used to be around, and unfortunately for some
people still heard quite recently, and that's because 10, 20, 30 years ago women were having
children at a much younger age. Now it's become quite normal for women in their 30s,
as we see with the world data, there's many countries where women have their first birth over
the age of 30. But this is quite a new phenomenon. Minds are changing, aren't they? Because I mean,
my mum had me when she was 30, that's in the early 1970s at the time, that was quite shocking, but
no longer the case. Stephanie, if you take that global view, that's your job at the World Service,
how common is it to be an older mum these days? So, the average age globally is 28.
So that's not that old? No, but it's changed a lot. I mean, it's hard
to tell exactly, say, going back three decades, six decades, but we have really good data from
the OECD countries, so, from wealthy countries who are generally good at data collection, and 60
years ago the average age was about 22. So, every decade it's gone up globally by about a year.
How common is it to hear of the much older mums, frankly?
I think Joyce might know more about this. But what I think I found really interesting is,
you know, we're talking about 28 is the average age for your first child. But people can go on,
continue to have children much later. And in India, for example, recently,
the age that people stop having children is going down. So that means that they're, I mean,
surveys have found that they're choosing not to continue to have children late into life. So,
I don't think that this means that people weren't having children in their forties
before. I think my mum was 39 when she had me and 41 when she had my little brother. So, you know,
I think, Joyce you might know more about how has the upper barrier moved very recently,
or is it just the lower barrier that we're talking about having moved? No, it has moved. So, the
ONS data for the UK shows now that for under 20s, we've got, I've written these numbers down, these
aren't off the top of my head, but under 20s, in the last set of data we had 13,739 births, but in
the over 40s, 40 to 44, there were over 28,000 births, and there were around 2,000 over 45.
Why are women choosing to have babies later? As you said, Stephanie, it is getting later.
Is it economic factors? Is it specifically career? Can you talk about global patterns?
I think with anything to do with fertility and demographics, it's always this kind of confluence
of economic, social, and cultural, and they all interplay so delicately it's hard to pull them
apart. But I think, certainly from surveys that I've looked at and people that I've spoken to,
economics is huge. I think this is linked very closely to urbanisation, when people move to
cities life becomes more expensive, space is at a premium. Not here in Western Europe or the US,
but in Asia education is expensive. So those things factor in. People want to
be further in their careers, they want to earn more money, they have to, in some cases,
before they can afford to have a child. Well, there's a specific issue in China,
isn't there? It used to have that one child policy. That was scrapped in 2016, but there are
lots of people in China who are still choosing not to have more than one child. The BBC went around,
and asked people and they said it's economics, they just can't afford a bigger family.
I think one of the important things here and everything about fertility is to do with choice or
should be to do with choice. A lot of people don't want to have children and now they don't feel the
pressure to anymore. It is more acceptable not to have children and that's a good thing
for people who never feel that instinct. Africa, Stephanie, historically has high
birth rates but if you look at it sort of continentally, birth rates per woman are
falling there as well. What are the factors? So, one of the most direct correlations
to fertility is education of girls and women. The longer you stay in education,
the later you leave it to have a child and that's across the board. The effect of one on the other
is just very clear. But also, urbanisation, because as people move to cities, they tend
to have fewer children and that's happening all over Africa. And access to contraception,
education about contraception, all of those things are having a really profound effect.
So even though the rates are still higher than most of the rest of the world, they are falling.
If I look at my daughter's social media feeds, when they let me in of course,
I do see talk about the environment linked to, you know, I'm not going to have children because
I want to protect the environment. How much of this is a proclaimed aim? And how much do you
actually see people across the world deciding not to have children because of the environmental
damage that a higher population will cause? Actually, my colleague, Navin Singh Khadka,
he wrote about this recently, and I think he found it difficult to find statistics on this
because I think it is still quite niche. And also, we're talking about people in Western countries,
in their early 20s usually, who don't have a huge stamp on the fertility figures. They're not yet
having babies anyway. So, it's not clear. We did a survey with UK teenagers,
so they were aged 16 to 18, and we asked them what factors may affect them having children.
And environment did come up, but also, we did this around, it was a couple of years ago,
so it was quite soon after COVID, and they definitely felt that the state of the planet
generally was something that they were very concerned about, so that really influenced them.
It would be really interesting to track those teenagers in 10 years when they're at the age
where they're thinking about this again and ask them then. I think that would be
a really interesting time. Yeah, I think so too. So,
I was just wondering, Joyce, can you take us through the hows of all of this?
Well, our fertility does decline, unfortunately. Female fertility decline is a very real event.
No matter how healthy and going to yoga every day and eating all the right foods and being
vegetarian and everything, it might seem that we can turn back the hands of our biological clock,
but I'm afraid we can't. So, the majority of women will start to see a decrease in
their fertility from age 35 and that's something that really resonates with women. They're like,
"that's so young, I'm just starting and now my fertility is declining", but that's the facts.
And fertility treatment certainly can help. Now we do have this process called egg freezing,
where if you freeze your eggs when you're younger, maybe your late 20s, very early 30s,
you're basically putting those eggs on hold in the freezer, and they will stay as they are. So,
if you had those eggs back when you were even 45, you would have the fertility basically
of a 28-year-old, if that's when you froze them. Our womb unbelievably stays fertile,
even past the menopause. So even when we're 60, 70, and as far as we're aware 80,
we should still be able to carry a baby. There are health risks as well we can discuss but certainly,
it's really, our fertility is down to the age of the egg and the quality.
You can't see us Joyce, but Stephanie's and my collective jaws are dropping
as you say that, I had no idea. A donor egg has been around for
decades. And so that is a procedure that can be used if a woman hasn't frozen her
eggs or if her frozen eggs haven't worked, egg donation is certainly a very viable option.
So, Stephanie if we've looked at the how, when, and where women are having babies later,
I now have a what for you which is what are the consequences of all of this?
It means two things, one the later you start having children the fewer you're going to have,
statistically and you know obviously I guess, you have less time to have a bigger family. But also,
when there's a lag, so say a previous generation had children younger and this
generation has children older, there's a lag. Both those things mean that that's contributing
to population decline and there's all sorts of worries about population decline which people
are probably familiar with. The idea that there won't be as many people paying into pension pots,
there won't be as many working people to pay for young people who need care and older people who
need care, anyone who's out of the workforce, and that's the real worry for governments.
If you have an older population, that's going to affect innovation and society in a way that,
when it comes to election time, older voters might prioritise different things. They may
not want to invest in ideas that look to the future because they won't be around
for it. Is that being that one of the dangers? And older people vote more than younger people
as well, which gives a kind of a snowball effect to that. But at the same time, I think we have to,
we are going to have to start looking at age differently because we're living so much longer.
One of the big issues with population aging is we're actually less healthy than we used to,
even though we're living longer, our health is declining, especially in a big country,
big developed, rich country like the US, health outcomes for older people
are actually declining. So, I often talk about this, there's so many problems,
but there are also so many potential solutions and I think a big one of them, when it comes
to tackling population aging, is investing in health care, investing in preventative healthcare.
Surely if you have fewer babies, mother-baby health should be improving?
It is, absolutely. And also, education, access to education is improving. Access to healthcare
in general is improving in places like sub-Saharan Africa, which historically
didn't have such good health outcomes. So, there are a lot of positives. And of course,
the big one, which a lot of people immediately think about, is the effect on climate change.
You do have governments scrabbling around for solutions, don't they? Isn't the most
common one to try and essentially pay people to have more babies?
South Korea, Russia, I think China, I know South Korea and Russia for sure have recently enough
instituted these one-off payments for your first child, more for your second, more for
your third. And they've had almost no effect on the demographics there and on the fertility rate.
What about the so-called Scandi model, the Scandinavian model, helping sort of beef-up
the welfare state for parents, giving paternity leave as well as maternity leave, for example?
Yeah, so that has been proven to work, and it's this holistic series of policies that
were government instituted, but created a kind of cultural norm where it was okay for mums and dads
to leave the office if their kids were sick or to go home at 4pm for the school pickup. And it
did have an effect, although briefly, on fertility rates there. But afterwards, that was in the early
2000s, and then they started to kind of level off again. So, it was kind of widely celebrated
in demographic circles as this solution, and then people were really confused when they
started to see that it wasn't having a kind of cumulative effect, that it was levelling off.
So, what about countries, Hungary for example, Italy, that sort of almost make it a national
priority? Have babies for your country , so that in Hungary they're Hungarian
babies and in Italy they're Italian babies, this is often governments that are, you know
anti-immigrant in their stances, for example. But at the same time, you have those governments
making laws against surrogacy, which seems counterproductive to trying to encourage people
to have more babies. So, I think in general, the lesson from the Nordic example is that these
policies have to be very holistic, and they can't just be about nationalism or giving people cash.
Is fertility treatment, is the private sector a possibility? Because India's biggest hotel chain,
Taj hotels, in 2018 announced plans to help female staff by paying for fertility treatment.
It's another thing that always makes people feel uncomfortable, with some companies suggesting that
they pay for egg freezing as well. I think we can't force people to do this. I think one of
the problems that the young people have told us in our survey, we did ask them to tell us in their
own words what they feel about having children. And a lot of them feel that they've used words
like 'loss of freedom', that it would be so life changing that they wouldn't have their sort of
fun time anymore. So, I think in in our culture we make doom and gloom out of lots of situations
such as having children, perimenopause etc and I think, as you've just heard, the financial
advantages that countries have tried to bring in haven't worked. I think we need to change
the narrative. I think we need to change the narrative that actually having kids is fabulous
and almost everyone that you ask will say it's the most important thing they've done in their life.
And it's fun. And it's not the end
of your young life, but we've got to change that. Yes, I agree, I have to say it was a big surprise
for me how much I loved it, I thought it was a well-kept secret, I kept being told about how it
ages you, yes, how you won't sleep again, yes, but I hadn't been told about how amazing it would be.
I guess, I mean everybody needs to be respected for the choices they make. Some people, of course,
as you know so well, Joyce, just unable to have children. One of the solutions that I was hearing
about is invest more in artificial intelligence, because if we're worried about productivity in
a shrinking labour market, maybe that's the answer, but that is a whole other Global Story
podcast for now. Stephanie and Joyce, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.
Thanks for having me. Thank you.
And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this and you want to hear more episodes of The
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