All the single ladies

There is something admittedly off putting about the ever growing birth rate debate, which turns a lot of people off  — including myself.

It’s a debate that has been dominated by oddballs. More and more people of all political persuasions are slowly coming to recognise the unaffordability of the pension system and the broader welfare state will be in the near future without fresh bodies ready to take up the tax burden. The more apocalyptic-minded among us are now imagining a total breakdown of aging societies, Mad Max warlords with zimmerframes, while the more selfish (read: me) are terrified of the real possibility of having to work well past the age of seventy. The best that can be said for the debate as of today is that everyone recognises that something must be done.

Interestingly however, ideology gets in the way of any consensus. Immigration apologists now paint an image of social upheaval if popular restrictions were to be carried out, while cranks on the right are quite eager to present massive repeals on women’s liberties as the singular way to raise birthrates. What’s lost in all the talk around the subject is any element of humanity of understanding. Rather, everyone engaged in it seems to treat the economy as a mere engine that needs to be stoked by people just finishing up their training contracts.

This is a damn shame, as much as it is eerie in nature. I doubt anyone is ever going to have a child out of a duty to keep the Treasury’s budget balanced, or so Margaret and Iain can afford their Viking River cruise down the Danube. It might sound odd to many policy wonks who like to view a country through the same prism as someone playing a Paradox game, but the birth of every child involves people making the decision to have one. Choosing to have a kid is a fairly illogical move for someone to make if you break it down: they’re a strain on time and money, they’re irritating, they stop you seeing your pals whenever you like, and they pick up and pass on every common cold a playground has to offer.

The majority of us will make the worst financial decision of our lives and choose to have a baby with the person we love, without ever imagining the wee fella as a future tax payer

Cuteness is all these little monsters have going for them, and yet this alone seems to tip the scales in such a direction that millions happily resign themselves to life of crap days out and buying Calpol every month. The best financial decision for most people would be to take their little tikes to the orphanage, and yet no one does as a rule. Instead, the majority of us will make the worst financial decision of our lives and choose to have a baby with the person we love, without ever imagining the wee fella as a future tax payer. It’s within this context that I find respecting women deciding to put off motherhood well into their thirties, or choosing to go without entirely.

Unlike many birth rate obsessives, who are very concerned by the idea of women wanting a solitary life, I don’t see how it differs from the past and its old maids cycling to holy communion. Britain has a long history of tolerating women’s preference on the matter, and there have always been women whose maternal instinct was limited. This differs greatly from large parts of the world where arranged marriages scuppered this option. The idea of cracking down on these women is as tasteless as it is nonsensical. The old adage that people used to have 2.5 children is plainly wrong; the average family would have had plenty more in Britain to make up for the many women who chose to have none. Orwell’s old maids cycling were balanced out by the families of Wigan Pier.

This means that there are those people, illogical as they may be financially, who would love nothing more than to have as many kids as they can accommodate. This became clear to me when I met up with older relations who were more than half tempted to have another baby once their eldest swaps out her childhood bedroom for a uni flat. They’ve always wanted a fifth you see, and as mad as that seems to most us, that type of thinking should be prized. Much like high earners are great for the tax system, those who love nothing more than seeing their many bairns playing together is a boon for the birth rate. I’d put money on readers knowing families who fit this bill already.

A clear goal for the state should be to make it as easy as possible for these implausible breeders to get to work, while allowing disinterested women to live as they please. It would be a failure of policy making to treat every woman as equally maternal by looking plainly at TFR rates. Matt Goodwin’s vague suggestion of taxing those without kids is simply unfair, and efforts in Hungary to give hand outs to mothers does little when a lot of the time the thing halting reproduction is a lack of bedrooms in a family’s home.

There should be a housing scheme for couples unable to keep their mitts off each other, and eager to have more babies. Let’s call it “family housing”; large homes peeled away from social housing or bought through compulsory purchase, which are rented out to couples. Giving one to a family with a child or one on the way would probably be the simplest and cheapest way to alleviate the problems faced by new parents without increasing the load on tax payers. In certain contexts, this can be achieved by local governments simply specifying who can live in the property they own and evicting non-reproductive people. Bumping would-be parents to the top of the social housing list void of their income, or perhaps because of their good jobs, would go a long way to increasing birth rates within a matter of years.

This way, you can forget all the expensive handouts, the Handmaid’s Tale talk, and the sci-fi calls for robot wombs coming out of Silicon Valley weirdos. Give people a choice with a little help from the state, by offering a lifestyle that a sizable chunk of people would jump at. We don’t actually need women as a whole to have more kids: not when we can find some women who would happily have six. The goal of increasing the birth rate after all, is only to increase the average number of kids born. Worrying about every woman’s reproductivity is exactly the wrong way to look at things, when all of us know some women who are absolutely baby mad.