United Kingdom

Fertility and Maternal Age

In 1996, the total number of families in the United Kingdom was 16.5, million but this number rose to 17.1 million in 2006. The number of families [Page 1230]headed by a married couple fell by half a million in the same 10 years to just over 12 million, whereas both lone-mother and cohabiting couple families increased to 2.3 million each. Two children remains the most common family size, but the average number of children per family dropped from 2 in 1971 to 1.8 in 2006. Despite this, the number of babies born in England and Wales reached an all-time high in 2008 to more than 700,000 births. In 2006, the Office for National Statistics noted that fertility rates for 2008 gave an average of 1.95 children for every woman (over her lifetime) in England and Wales, the highest since 1973, when there was an average of 2 children for every woman. Migration is key to the rising birthrate in the United Kingdom, with 24 percent of all babies born to mothers themselves born abroad, up from 23 percent in 2007 and 14 percent in 1998.

In the United Kingdom, as in other countries, there is some medical, political, and public concern over rising maternal ages. There were more than 26,000 women over 40 years old giving birth in 2008, as opposed to under 13,000 in 1997. The United Kingdom's oldest new biological mother so far is Elizabeth Adeney, who gave birth in 2009 at the age of 66. The over-40 birthrate rose by 5 percent between 2007 and 2008, and the chances of a woman having a baby between the ages of 35 and 40 also went up, by almost 50 percent, over the same decade. On the other hand, birthrates among women under 24 have fallen over the past 10 years, and those for women in their late 20s and early 30s have climbed much more slowly.

Later pregnancies do carry some health implications for both mother and child. After the age of 35, the prospect of premature births or birth defects increases markedly, along with the risk of high blood pressure and diabetes for the mother. However, some of the concern is ethical rather than medical, although research suggests that mothers over the age of 50 make good parents and are just as psychologically well adjusted as those in their 30s and 40s. In addition, there is also great political and media concern about young motherhood in the United Kingdom, as reflected in the investment in the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy, which aims to substantially reduce teenage pregnancy in the United Kingdom and provide support for teenage parents to reduce their and their babies' risk of long-term social exclusion. Again, research highlights positive as well as negative aspects of the experience of young motherhood, although the complexity of the experience is often ignored and young mothers are stereotyped as inevitably inadequate mothers.

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