Definitely baby... why, like Lily Allen and Peaches Geldof, women are having their babies younger

Like Lily, Peaches, Sienna and now Adele, a growing number of young women in their twenties are bumping the trend of waiting until later to have their babies
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17 July 2012

It seems everybody is having babies. Adele, it now turns out, will have her first child in just two months’ time. Lily Allen is now pregnant with her second, and most recently Sienna Miller gave birth to baby girl Marlowe just over a week ago.

Meanwhile the Office for National Statistics last week released its latest data on the birth rates in England and Wales, showing that, despite the recession, more babies were born last year than in 2010.

But while the figures also show that the number of women having babies in their forties has nearly trebled in the past 20 years (to 29,350 live births to women of 40 and over, up from 9,835 in 1991), helping to push up the average age for having a baby to 29.7, mothers in that upper age group still only represent four per cent of all the live births.

And, partly thanks to the many reports warning them about the future of their fertility, women in their late twenties and early thirties are feeling the pressure to get pregnant. Like Adele, 24, Lily Allen, 27, Sienna Miller, 30, and 23-year-old Peaches Geldof, who gave birth to her first baby, boy Astala, in April, they are deciding not to wait, but to have children now.

Leonora Bamford, who recently set up the childcare site, The Baba Blog, is one of these women. At 30 she already has two children — aged one and two. “I wanted to have children ever since I can remember,” she says, admitting: “I was incredibly lucky I met my husband in my early twenties.”

As some in the blogosphere have criticised 24-year-old Adele, saying she is too young for a baby, so Bamford came under the same scrutiny. “A lot of people said they thought I was too young [to have children at 28], but I don’t think it really matters ... Having seen the generation above us, they [women] know that those putting it off found there are all sorts of problems, so now women are under such pressure to have children younger.”

She refers, of course, to those women about 15 years her senior — a demi-generation encouraged to go far in their careers before even thinking of children — and to reports which lead us to believe that when women decide around age 40 that they have reached suitable financial security and seniority in their jobs to have children, many end up requiring fertility treatment.

Despite a number of medical advances that suggest the efficacy of IVF will keep increasing, that ovarian stem cells may be able to replenish a woman’s diminishing egg supply, and that tests might turn up that can predict precisely when we’ll stop being fertile, women are still told with regularity that at 35 our chances of getting pregnant plummet — filling young women with fertility fear.

“Quite a lot of my friends who are climbing the career ladder now after all of these horror stories are planning to have children in just a few years, even though they thought they would wait,” says Bamford.

The new ONS statistics do show a hint of a shift. As we might expect, birth rates for women in age groups 30-34, 35-39 and 40 and over have been rising fairly steadily over the past 20 years as women delay parenting, while the birth rates in the under 20s and the 20-24 age group have been dropping.

But it’s in the middle that the trend is perhaps the most interesting. Because although the ONS figures show that there has been a slight drop in birth rates within the 25-29 age group just in the past year, the general trend shows that after a significant drop for women of this age group between 1991 and 2001, the numbers are now starting to recover.

The 2011 figures show that there are 106.8 live births per 1,000 women aged 25-29 compared to just 91.5 a decade ago, in 2002 when the rate had plummeted from the 1991 figure of 119.4 births per 1,000 women in that age group.

Meanwhile, a study for the vitamin supplement Centrum Pregnancy Care at the end of last year, which surveyed 3,000 women, showed that more than 40 per cent of the women asked said they had planned to try for children between the ages of 26 and 30 — even if it also showed that little more than a third of women actually end up having their babies when they plan to.

The fact is that although many women may wish to have babies earlier, unlike their celebrity counterparts, they may not be in the financial position to do so.

The Centrum survey showed that 58 per cent of women felt it was important to own a property before having a baby and the largest proportion of those surveyed wanted £5,000 saved before starting a family.

With news last week showing that London is the only region in which house prices are continuing to rise and with the recession sapping earning potential, isn’t it bound to become harder for women to feel financially ready for children?

Author of pregnancy guide From Bump to Baby Natasha Harding has a different perspective. Now 37, she had her first baby at 31. “Financially, being young I could start a new career [after children]. If you are older, then it’s more difficult.”

Before starting a family, Harding quit her job in journalism and trained as a yoga teacher. “I didn’t want to be an older mum. I wanted to have the energy to play with [my son] and still have a life at the other end.”

Having interviewed several women for her book, she believes that: “People are almost putting family before career again. They are jumping off the treadmill and saying, ‘If that means we can’t have a five-bedroom house then we will just deal with it’. Many more mothers are also deciding to start new careers and setting up small businesses.”

Recent years have seen the rise of the “mumpreneur” — mothers who set up businesses from home that are compatible with their childcare commitments (the word has even made it into the dictionary).

However, these alternative careeer options and new routes to financial security are not an answer for all the potential benefits of being an older mother. New research announced this year by the Institute of Child Health at University College London and Birkbeck College London shows that children of older mothers were likely to develop a broader vocabulary, attain higher IQ scores and be less likely to have accidents or need hospital treatment.

The flip side to this, says Harding, is that: “One of the oldest mothers I spoke to said her body didn’t recover from pregnancy as well as younger mothers’ bodies did. She and her husband also found it harder to adapt to having a child, which older parents sometimes do because they have been used to putting themselves first for that much longer. These are all things motivating people to have babies sooner.”

So, instead of “Maybe baby, but definitely later,” women are now starting to think “Definitely baby”.

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