The number of women without a partner having children by IVF or sperm donation has trebled in the past 10 years. IVF itself is not unproblematic; provision on the NHS varies wildly, with hurdles and prohibitions that range from random to downright cruel. There are trusts that won’t offer it over the age of 35, others that won’t if her partner has children from a previous relationship. Private clinics, meanwhile, can prey on people, gouging them for add-on treatments, exploiting hopes they know are unrealistic. Egg freezing – where numbers are also at a record high – is a similar racket, with the sector often accused of misleading promises or understating risks, and prices very high: the process typically costs £7,000. Fertility treatment, whether solo or with a partner, is not for sissies. Yet women’s increasing confidence to do it outside of a traditional partnership illustrates a sea change in attitudes to how families are made, and a positive one.
It’s nearly 20 years since two obstetricians, Susan Bewley and Melanie Davies, published Which Career First: The most secure age for childbearing remains 20 to 35. I remember interviewing them at the time, feeling vexed by this intervention. In the surrounding media environment, various other ways of policing, judging and problematising female autonomy – abortion discourse, for instance – had passed out of fashion. Other hot-button issues that gave society licence to pass judgment on women’s morality and fitness – such as breastfeeding and behaviours in pregnancy – were only just getting going. Fertility and the risks around “leaving it too late” , however, were discussed constantly, and it had all the hallmarks of a patriarchal put-up job. People who didn’t really give a stuff about infertility as a lived experience – the complexity and pain of it – nevertheless had extremely strong views over what kind of risk “career women” posed to the greater good, and whether they would regret their choices down the line. The issue was used strategically to justify a broader opprobrium for women making any choices at all. I remember editors in the 90s (not at the Guardian!), always looking for starkest headline: anything along the lines of: “Have a baby by the time you’re 30, doctors warn”, was the holy grail.
All the while, the average age of women having their first child was steadily creeping up; with amazing reliability, it’s gone up for both men and women every year for the past half-century, breaching that supposedly magic age of 30 for mothers 10 years ago.
Did this have anything to do with material conditions and a knock-on effect on relationships? It seems pretty unlikely that house prices can rise so much faster than wages without having any impact on when people feel ready to start a family. One economist estimated in 2017 that a 10% increase in house prices led to a 1.3% decrease in the English birth rate, as homeowners tended to have more children and renters fewer (renters being more numerous). Since the spectre of the biological clock only ever loomed over women (“It’s a clock, not a bomb!”, women’s magazines used to periodically kick back), we were caught in this vice, where practicality demanded one decision – that we delay having children – while mother nature demanded another: have them young.
It’s almost the definition of disempowerment, when all good choices are incompatible, and you can be found deficient whichever way you jump: so of course, the kind of people who don’t like female emancipation at the best of times were delighted to find that women couldn’t “have it all”, because science said no.
When I went to interview Bewley and Davies about their study, I was dismayed to find that they were great: thoughtful, empathetic, penetratingly intelligent professionals who just wanted the best for women. They weren’t trying to hector women, Bewley said (I’m paraphrasing); they were just sounding the warning – just as if you saw people heading north, you’d tell them to dress for the weather. I’d fallen into the classic trap of trying to object to the narrative at the level of facts that turned out to be true. Some women will struggle to get pregnant over the age of 35. Just because the Daily Mail revels in that reality – and uses it to keep young women in a state of low-grade panic – doesn’t make it go away.
But it was not broadly socially acceptable then for women to take their destiny into their own hands and make motherhood happen on their own. I only met one woman last century who’d had kids by sperm donation and, as a maverick and free spirit, social disapprobation meant nothing to her (an example: her first child said that he’d be happy to have a sibling, so long as it had the same name as him. So she had two children called Ned – one, well, technically, two names have been changed).
So even though, beneath these figures of rising IVF numbers, there are economic drivers getting worse not better, and a fertility industry that still leaves many people crushed with disappointment and much poorer, women have climbed, steadily, collectively, iteratively, from a place of very little agency – where you had to wait for Mr Right but also, start yesterday – to a place of far greater autonomy, where motherhood can be chosen unilaterally and disapproval would be neither expected nor brooked. To repurpose the saying, the patriarchy had the (biological) clocks, but we had the time.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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