I love children but made my husband get the snip and have pledged NEVER to start a family… here’s why, reveals JESSICA LORIMER
My cousin had a baby two months ago – and what an adorable poppet she is. Looking at pictures of her posted online, I felt a swell of pride on my cousin’s behalf.
Did it provoke a twinge of maternal longing for myself, too?
It did not. I am 35, at the height of the ticking clock years, but I know I will never have a baby. It’s not that I’m infertile – at least to my knowledge – nor that I dislike children. I love children.
Yet, at my request, my husband has had a vasectomy – doctors refused to sterilise me, though I did ask – and we have pledged never to start a family.
For how can I bring an innocent warm bundle into the world when none of us can say that the world will even be habitable for them? In the past few weeks, two new sets of statistics have emerged – the first to widespread hand-wringing; the second to barely a whimper.
The first showed that the UK birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since records began. Between 2022 and 2023, the fertility rate for England and Wales decreased from an average of 1.49 children per woman to 1.44 –the lowest rate on record and far fewer than are needed to sustain an ageing population.
And the second set of stats? Those were the ones telling us that 2024 is ‘virtually certain’ to be the hottest year on record, according to the European Climate Service.
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