The British Baby Bust
An increasing, and shocking, number of women in the UK are choosing not to have children. (Illustration by The Free Press; images via Getty)
In the UK, deaths could outnumber births this year. To understand why, I spoke to the women driving the trend.
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5 mins
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Mara is 36, living in London, highly educated, professionally successful, and six years into a stable relationship. She has thought about having children—carefully, repeatedly, and for a long time. And she has decided not to.
She told me that she would like to make one thing clear: She is not confused. “It’s not that I don’t have reasons,” she told me. “It’s that I have too many. If you knocked one down, I’d just give you 10 more.”
When I asked her for a one-word explanation for why she is skipping out on motherhood, she laughed. “One-word answers always make me wish that English worked like German,” she said. “There should be a word that means ‘would completely ruin everything I like about life.’ ”
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