"We asked ourselves, ‘Do we want to live comfortably or do we want to have a child?’ If we’d chosen to become parents, we worried that we wouldn’t be able to give the child, or ourselves, the kind of life they, or we, deserved. In the end, the mortgage crisis made our minds up.” Thirty-eight-year-old charity worker Lauren sighs as she recounts the various calculations that she and her partner, a solicitor, did when they began discussing the possibility of parenthood.
“Our income is fine but I also care for my mother, who is disabled, so, all in all, we run into debt most months. When my partner and I sat down about 18 months ago to do all the sums we realised that with childcare being as expensive as it is, it wouldn’t make sense for me to work if we did have a child — but then we’d barely be able to cover the mortgage. When the rates went up after the Truss mini-budget, we knew that was that," says the south Londoner. "We can’t move somewhere cheaper because it would disrupt my mum’s care too much. I definitely had this out-of-body feeling when we were going through it all, it felt wrong to be talking about budgets and spreadsheets and all that clinical stuff in the same breath as a baby but I suppose that’s just the truth of living in a city like London.”
