Fewer people are having babies than ever before in England and Wales (Picture: Getty)

Your social media feeds may all be swamped by your mates’ ultrasound pictures but us Brits are actually having fewer kids than ever.

In fact, last year, birth rates in England and Wales fell to the lowest level since records began back in 1938.

A new report from the Office of National Statistics has revealed that the number of live births across the two countries in 2018 was 11.1 per 1,000 people, or 657,076 births in total.

That’s a 0.5% decrease on the year before and a 45.9% decrease since 1947 – at the height of this country’s post-war baby boom.


So why are we having fewer sprogs?



The ONS said that falling fertility rates and an ageing population where to blame, with an increase in the number women above childbearing age.

The report also found that the total fertility rate (TFR) was lower than almost every year on record. That rate specifically measures the live births for women who are of ‘childbearing age’ – between 15 and 44.

Over the past six years, that rate has gone down every year.

And again, that’s being put down to a number of things including better access and knowledge of contraception, lower levels of fertility and more women waiting until later in life to try for a baby.

Almost half of babies were born to unmarried parents, while the birthrate of married couples was found to have suffered the largest decrease since 1973.

So what does this all mean?

It suggests that our ideas of family and marriage are still changing. We (rightly) don’t expect women to be chained to the maternity ward and more of us are aren’t allowing kids to determine who we end up with or the legislation around our relationships.

But it is a fact that fertility drops off – and that fertility for both men and women seems to be increasingly compromised.

Back in 2017, scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that sperm counts among men in the west have more than halved over the past 40 years and are currently falling by an average of 1.4% a year – something experts have called a fertility ‘crisis’.

‘The results are quite shocking,’ said Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist and lead author of the study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

‘This is a classic under the radar huge public health problem that is really neglected.’

The World Health Organisation has warned that our current knowledge of male infertility is ‘very low’ – and that fact means that a lot of the chat around infertility and low birth rates tends to focus on women and female fertility.

We know that as we age, the likelihood of getting pregnant naturally falls, but the lack of attention and study in the changing fertility of men is putting women under massive pressure to take the hit. Even when the problem is with the guy, the woman is still the one who actually has to have IVF performed on her.



Perhaps more research into male fertility will impact on birth rates, as would research in to common but chronically under-studied female fertility-affecting conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome.

But ultimately, less pressure on women to have kids – particularly given the current climate crisis – can only be a good thing.

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