Marriage closes the birth gap

News

Across the political spectrum, worries are growing about our historically low birth rate.

After falling for 15 years, in 2022 the UK’s average birth rate reached 1.49 children per woman, well below the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1.

A below-replacement birth rate indicates an ageing population where the ratio of workers to retired people drops, decreasing the capacity of a country to support its older people – and everything else as well.

There is a fear among some that talking about falling birth rates could lead to a dystopia where the State tells women how many children they must have. But in fact, as former Conservative MP Miriam Cates has pointed out, women themselves want more children than they currently end up having – a phenomenon known as the ‘birth gap’.

When asked how many children they would ideally like to have, 18-24-year-old women say they want 2.25 on average, rising to 2.41 for 25-35-year-olds – far higher than the 1.49 birth rate.

The tragedy is that many leave it too late to start, with 50% of those who wait to start a family until they’re over 30 never having children. Aaron Bastani, who co-founded think tank Novara Media, notes: “There are loads of women I know, who are in their late 30s, who have one child, and now they’re like, ‘honestly, I wish we’d started earlier, and I wish the state gave us some more resources – we would’ve had two’.”

But there is a solution that is ready to hand: marriage. Research shows that married people are much more likely to achieve their family goals – the more so the longer they are married.

Demographer Lyman Stone explains: “Essentially all of the decline in fertility since 2001 can be explained by changes in the marital composition of the population. Married, single, and divorced women are all about as likely, controlling for age and marital status, to have kids now as they were in 2001. But today, a smaller proportion of women are married during those peak-fertility years.”

This tallies with the reasons women give for not yet having children. Top answers include wanting to become less economically vulnerable and wanting to move into their own home – factors strongly linked with getting married.

At C4M, we know that the birth gap is primarily a marriage gap. There will be no solution to the birth rate crisis without also addressing the steep drop in the marriage rate and the widespread putting off of marriage to later in life. Government has a key role to play in addressing this. But so do we all. That’s why we will continue to be at the forefront of bringing the many benefits of real marriage to wider attention.