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and women contemplating a family of their own face a long list of obstacles: to be able to afford appropriate housing; to afford or clear university debts; to achieve job stability and a level of wages that can support more than one person (or two); and to make a career and childcare compatible. And that’s setting aside the very modern desire to win the lottery of finding a ‘good’ partner, in romantic terms. With all of these obstacles standing in the way, having children is less of a priority – or, at least, less of an immediate one. So men and women in the industrialized world are increasingly waiting to start families until their mid-thirties, or even into their forties.

Global fertility is in general decline. This trend is most pronounced in industrialized countries, especially in Western Europe, where the population is projected to decline dramatically over the next fifty years. According to the US Census Bureau, nearly all the world’s developed regions are reporting fewer births, and about half the world’s population lives in regions where the number of births is fewer than necessary to achieve long-term population stability. And that’s just in the short term. Of the 223 countries listed in the CIA’s World Fact Book, ninety-four now post a fertility rate of less than two children per woman – a rate that means fewer kids to support ageing parents. The ninety-four countries on the CIA list include China, Japan, and South Korea, all of which have lower birth rates than do the countries of Europe. Birth rates are certainly falling in Europe and in the US due to the current trend towards starting a family later in life. The US rate squeaks above two, at 2.05 – putting it just outside this club. The European Union’s statistics agency predicts that by 2050 the federation’s population will drop by around seven million.

Studies show that seventy-four percent of women who definitely or probably want children in practice delay getting pregnant because of relationship issues. For most women, it’s not work or training worries, or other distractions, that cause the delay, but basically because they hadn’t yet found the ‘right’ partner. That’s not to say that career ambitions don’t play a role. The second most common cause for delayed motherhood in developed countries is the social rewards that come to those who achieve professional success. Things like educational status, a prestigious or lucrative career, and the allure of luxury (and sometimes not-so-luxury) goods interfere with a woman’s opportunities to reproduce, because acquiring the trappings of success takes energy and time, right at the peak ages for fertility.

These sociological and economic shifts have had the effect that, in industrialized countries, the average age of first childbirth is increasing, and more women are having no children at all. That’s one part of the story. The other part of it comes down to the limits of the human body. Because, of course, the bane of any woman who delays having children will be her age. Seven out of ten women surveyed who said they wanted children are concerned or very concerned about whether they will actually be able to have a baby by the time they get around to trying.

For many animals, fertility fades alongside all the other functions of the body – a slow, steady decline that comes with age. A man becomes increasingly infertile with age, but may still be able to eke out a sperm and fertilize an egg into his seventies or eighties – around the time when the rest of his body is starting to shut down. A woman, as we have seen, loses the ability to reproduce some thirty years before then, and the process comes as something of a shock. Usually, all of a woman’s other organs still function, her faculties are undiminished, her health remains robust – all the biological stuff remains more or less the same, except she can no longer have a baby.

Becoming sterile with age is not exclusive to humans, technically. Rodents, whales, dogs, rabbits, elephants, and domestic livestock experience an abrupt end to fertility too. Other primates, such as chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, and macaques, also have a ‘biological clock’ and experience drops in fertility as they age. Still, female chimpanzees in the wild have been known to give birth at very advanced ages – even into their fifties and sixties – surpassing the UK natural-birth record set by Kathleen Campbell at the age of fifty-five. (Interestingly, the male chimps seem to prefer mating with these older females – a point that doesn’t often get trotted out in evolutionary psychology. Perhaps, thinking like a Darwinist, it’s because the older female chimps have displayed their fertility – most, it is presumed, have previously given birth.)

What is unique to humans among the primates is that our females have the potential to survive for a very long time after they become sterile. Though today humans enjoy longer and generally healthier lives – with access to better medical care than our ancestors had just three generations ago – the timing of the menopause has remained more or less the same since the days of the hunter-gatherers. Women stop being fertile around the age of fifty, and women live on average to be seventy years old – and much older in some countries. (In Japan, the average life expectancy for a woman born today is eighty-six years, and both the UK and the US come in at over eighty.) In reproductive terms, this is a waste of about one third of one’s life. It’s even worse when you consider the maximum life span for humans of about 122 years. If a woman lived that long, she would spend nearly sixty-nine percent of her life without the capacity to have babies. This isn’t fantastical speculation; by 2025 the global