34 - Managing expectations and achieving realism: the ‘realpolitik’ of reproductive ageing and its consequences

Summary

In 2006, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) produced a document, written by Mike Dixon and Julia Margo, detailing the consequences of the way we choose, en masse, to reproduce. Their striking finding was that the timing, as much as the methods, of starting families has a number of impacts. First, late maternity drives fertility down and sparks a pension and overall welfare crisis if there are fewer citizens of working age than there are either side of it. Second, while childlessness is of course a personal issue, if women are finding themselves involuntarily childless at the age of 45 years through a lack of public health information, this raises questions about governmental duty and dereliction thereof. Third, if middle-class women are having children progressively later while women in lower social brackets are having children much earlier, the social divide that predates the maternity ossifies into alarmingly iniquitous outlooks for those children. The link between early motherhood and poverty is pronounced and any government with a stated interest in reducing child poverty would have to start here.

So, a number of questions remain. What are the predictions for population and how much should we trust them? Is there a European or another developed world model that we could usefully follow and which examples should we be avoiding? If population is being driven downwards, what are the driving factors?