The Narrow Focus on Babies Explains Britain’s Birth Rate Collapse, By Joanna Gray
It seems counterintuitive but the crabbed focus on babies goes some way to explaining Britain's demographic collapse. Once, we used to have a vast panoramic view of our place in history – revering our ancestors and casting our gaze forwards onto our unborn descendants. Now in this world of carpe diem, we are boxed into the present moment. We have become unable to think beyond our immediate circumstances – specifically the capsizing affect newborns have on fun-times and finances.
Where once all families were set up in order to further the prospects for their children and their children's children, now nepo babies are thought disgusting and every generation is expected to graft individually from scratch. The brilliant series Succession encapsulates our current carelessness about our descendants: emotionally neglect children to the extent they become unworthy of inheriting their father's empire. The results for our demography of this immediacy focus and inability to think generationally are devastating.
The provisional fertility rate for England and Wales fell to 1.39 children per woman in 2025, the lowest level on record – this needs to sit at 2.1 children per woman to sit at replacement levels.
Let us compare the responses of national figures to creating children. Molly Mae and Tommy Fury, who met on Love Island, have a three year-old daughter Bambi and recently announced the birth of their son Midas. Molly Mae has been praised for discussing her 'newborn trench', explaining:
I honestly cannot remember a lot of that time with Bambi and feel like I've completely blurred it from my memory and tried to forget in a sad way. I was so out of my depth. I felt like I didn't have a clue what I was doing.
Such sentiments are familiar, with stories abounding about the challenges and tiredness of caring for newborn babies. There is even a push for greater recognition of post-baby depression in fathers. More broadly, we are relentlessly told how expensive children are: the Big Issue reports on the rising costs of nappies, Barnado's the unaffordability of baby essentials, the Resolution Foundation of housing. Is it any wonder we've stopped breeding?
Now, let us compare the responses of two other national figures: the mothers of Athelstan – England's first King – and William the Conqueror. These reports may be later embellishments, but they do speak to a broader and deeper concept of having children than we are now able to comprehend.
William of Malmesbury wrote in the 1100s:
There was in a certain village a shepherd's daughter, a girl of exquisite beauty, who gained through the elegance of her person what her birth could never have bestowed. In a vision she beheld a prodigy: the moon shone from her womb, and all England was illuminated by the light.
This woman of exquisite beauty would go on to become Athelstan's mother. Similarly Benoît de Saint-Maure's Chronique des Ducs de Normandie, which is dated to 1180-1200, records Herleva, the mother of William the Conqueror, recalling:
Now I saw in my sleep that a tree issued from me, so large, so tall, so straight and so wonderful that its shadow reached the sky here above us, which startled me. It overshadowed the whole of Normandy and the sea and the great English land.
It is often suggested that between one and 1.5 million Americans descend from William the Conqueror and up to 100 million worldwide. Such aspirations were not only the preserve of monarchs, but farmers who worked for their children to expand their farms, of craftsmen who trained their children in skills and grew their businesses, to daughters who would become much honoured mothers themselves.
Obviously such imagery would be mocked and scorned today. What are you saying you reactionary old bigot, that women are mere vessels of men? Perhaps I am. Perhaps this greater conception of ourselves is ennobling and expansive and empowering in ways that we once knew to be true, and have since forgotten. Think not of glorious futures for our children: we are now only encouraged to hope for an apprenticeship or manageable student debt.
I am writing this after our middle son turned 18. To see him blossom from a tiny baby, born into my husband's arms as I leant over the sofa, into a tall and strong man is glorious. His potentiality takes my breath away. What will he and his descendants achieve? Will they invent things, explore space, colonise Mars? Will his sons and daughters build deep oceanic cities? Will his talent for acting and music spawn a new type of theatre? Will he, like Athelstan, bring illumination to England?
To even whisper such things will have women laughed at today. Yet, there ought to be more to our conception of having children than the tedious self-sacrifice of nappies and sleepless nights, and – at best – children's ability to make parents happy. As Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (mother of one billion descendants) said:
Trees are not known by their leaves, or even their blossoms, but by their fruits.
