Whenever the latest stats on baby-making drop, they always seem to tell the same, depressing story: we’ve stopped having children. Not altogether, of course. But we’re having fewer, and putting it off till later. This is true across every demographic, in nigh-on every country. The UK birth rate, for example, fell to a record low of 1.39 children per woman in 2025, down from 1.9 in 2010 and well below the replacement rate of 2.1 that’s required to maintain a stable population. Live births dropped to 585,000 in 2025, the lowest annual total in 50 years.
A new study on social infertility, conducted on behalf of the IVI Institute, has found that almost 40 per cent of women are becoming mothers later than they want to, with the average delay in having children standing at six years. This had the knock-on effect of women having fewer children than they’d originally wished. The most common reasons given were that women felt they were too young, didn’t have enough money, and hadn’t met the right partner.
