It often feels as though being an adult woman is a long, winding series of tradeoffs. Not in the banal “I can have another glass of wine, but I’ll be exhausted tomorrow” sense, but in far more existential ways. It’s sort of like living in a gameshow where you’re blindfolded and constantly asked to make impossible choices while an audience of people you vaguely know shout that you’re making the “wrong” decision. And you’ll definitely live to regret it.
Pick Door A: focus on your career. But an annoying chorus tells you that if you delay starting a family you risk having a fertility panic further down the line. Or, Door B: prioritise finding a partner and the creation of a nuclear family early on. The older women at the back mutter longingly that “you’ll miss out on the untold treasures of a single life” which lurked behind Door A. (They swear that they are, in no way, projecting onto you).
Unless you are someone who knows that you definitely do not want to have a family, many women end up with a cricked neck, courtesy of always looking back over their shoulder as they run the gauntlet between indecision and uncertainty. Wondering if they are hitting the right milestones at the right time.
Record numbers of women in the UK are reaching the age of 30 child-free, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). This is part of a global trend in delayed motherhood but, in the UK, it has ushered in a historical first. More than half (50.1 per cent) of women in England and Wales who were born in 1990 did not have a child when they turned 30 in 2020. They are the first generation for whom this is the case. This figure was almost three times higher than the lowest number of women ever to be child-free at 30 in 1941, during the Second World War.
There are many reasons for this. Studies point to factors like the availability of contraception which gives reproductive autonomy, and the fact that women are more likely to enter higher education and work, as well as changing attitudes towards relationships and motherhood.
Alongside this change is another emerging shift. A growing number of women are deciding to step through a door which, previously, wasn’t really on offer at all: intentional solo parenthood. According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) an increasing number of unpartnered women are choosing to enter motherhood alone. It recorded a 44 per cent increase in the number of women with no partner embarking on IVF between 2019 and 2022.
This tracks. Not everyone wants to be a parent of course, but all around me, my 30-something friends (straight and queer) who are childfree and either single or unsure about their relationships, but think they may like to start a family in the future, whisper that they could just do it alone if the “right person” does not appear. “It’s not as scary as the idea of doing it with someone who doesn’t really want to or messes it up,” one friend recently joked. “My mum thinks it’s the best option for me,” another said completely seriously.
More than once recently, I too have found myself seriously contemplating solo parenthood. Whenever a friend gives birth, which more are doing these days, I watch them open up as they do something which shows love in ways that are unfathomable until you see them up close. I also notice how our friendship deepens, the ways we are forced to develop new levels of understanding and it makes me wonder whether there are ways of doing this without a romantic partner – a fragile metaphorical basket into which your fears, stresses and needs are placed.
If I worry about who would be there to share key moments, like the child’s first steps or first day at school, I remember that my friends share pictures of their outfits and lunch with me on a daily basis. There would be an entire village demanding baby content. Over the weekend, I listened as one friend told another, who is currently heavily pregnant, that she would come over and do night feeds “any time” – help would be on hand.
In dreaming about this imaginary future, I’m struck by the fact that the idea of being pregnant and unpartnered excites me more than it scares me. Perhaps because even if you don’t choose to bring children up without a partner, you could end up doing it anyway.
This move towards intentional single motherhood is not just anecdotal, experts are seeing an increase in the number of women looking into this. Professor Geeta Nargund is a fertility expert and medical director of CREATE Fertility and abc ivf. She told me that she is increasingly seeing women who want to embark on solo parenthood. “For many single women, fertility treatments offer them the option to have a child when they are ready,” she said. “Many go through fertility treatment because they have not found a suitable partner. While a growing number are choosing to go through IVF treatment using donor sperm.” A growing number of young women are also opting to freeze their eggs (for better or worse, as I’ve written).
I’m privileged, of course, in even being able to consider this option. Most single people using donor sperm don’t qualify for fertility treatment on the NHS: over half of NHS England integrated care boards, which decide on who can get fertility treatment locally, don’t include single women in IVF policies at all. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) guidelines state that funded access to IVF in England is available to women “who have not conceived after two years of regular unprotected intercourse or 12 cycles of artificial insemination”.
Other trusts require people to spend thousands of pounds to prove infertility, by paying privately for between three and 12 cycles of artificial insemination before they can be treated. If I wanted solo parenthood, I would have to pay.
Without NHS support, on average, one cycle of IVF costs £5,000 according to the HFEA. In the UK it’s also illegal to pay someone to donate sperm so anyone with a uterus looking to embark on solo parenthood with sperm that has not been gifted by someone they know, will have to travel and pay. (The cost of a vial of sperm starts at around £950 and, depending on where you go to buy it).
Then you add in the cost of children after they are born – the annual cost of childcare has risen by £2,000 since 2010, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the UK now has the second-highest childcare costs among leading economies, and the charity Pregnant Then Screwed found two thirds of parents are paying more for their childcare than their rent or mortgage – and the financial strain on a single person who wants to become a parent alone is greater than for those in couples.
Fortunately, I could afford to do it alone in a world where benefit caps and unaffordable housing push so many into poverty. For a cohort of single women like me who have the financial stability and/or family support to manage it – known to sociologists as SINKYs (Single Income No Kids) – it could be doable. But it’s not only the financial privilege that we benefit from – this new cohort are also unlikely to face the same stigma that has long dogged single mothers.
The idea of women bringing up children without men is hardly a historical anomaly (although I am interested in the role of cis men in all of this…), it’s happened since time immemorial. There are around 1.8 million single parents in the UK and 90 per cent of them are women, they might not all have chosen solo parenthood but they’re there, doing all of the work. Throughout the 90s, the single mother was a political scapegoat. A bogeywoman who was demonised, painted as responsible for all of society’s ills from soaring juvenile crime to housing shortages and to the breakdown of society. Today it feels like a cultural reimagining of man-less mothers and solo parents which allows women to even contemplate doing it alone.
A radical reimagining of the 2.4 nuclear heteronormative family is no bad thing. And, perhaps, this was an inevitable conclusion of the choices won for women through decades of feminism which have resulted (almost as much in practice as in theory) in equal access to education, employment and reproductive rights. But it might also speak to some of the challenges that modern women who have relationships with men face when it comes to finding a romantic partner (studies show that more young men are single than ever and nobody can really figure out why).
And unless IVF is made more accessible to would-be solo parents, changing the status quo around single motherhood only really benefits a small number of women like me, not those who need it the most.
Professor Nargund believes “that in order to help all women who want to create a family – including single women or same sex couples – it is essential that they are supported fairly and equally by the NHS”.
(A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said it was looking into this. “We asked the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to undertake a consultation about the priorities for reform as we recognise legislation needs to be modernised. The report raises important issues about considering regulatory powers that better protect fertility patients and the quality of the service they receive. We will respond to its recommendations in due course.”)
Solo parenthood is hardly utopia, ask any single parent. But, at a time when Britain’s birth rate is falling, why ration NHS support to those people who want to conceive and become parents? Why make it a privilege? Our society has changed in recent decades; the make-up of families can too and it is time we stopped punishing women who are going it alone, through choice or not.
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