Only the middle class can’t afford babies
Discussion
Interesting commentary from Minette Marin in today's Sunday Times. This is certainly an accurate assessment of the situation many of my friends are in.
Only the middle class can’t afford babies
Minette Marrin
A sociologist from Mars would be mystified by the contradictions with which we torment ourselves in this country. First we are told that not enough women are having babies and that we are close to a disastrous fertility crisis. (“Britain suffers a baby gap of 92,000 a year,” according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research.) There soon will not be enough young people to support the old and taxes will have to go up.
Next we learn that some women are having too many babies and the government’s best efforts to discourage them have proved an expensive and scandalous failure: “£150m plan has failed to cut teenage pregnancies” screamed a news splash on Friday, based on official figures. Abortions are at a record high, approaching 200,000 a year, with the greatest rise among women in their early twenties.
It was also reported last week that women are planning to have babies later and later — and are then devastated by predictable problems in conceiving. Presumably younger, more fertile mothers are what we need; however, as reported, the government has been spending many millions to stop very young women having early babies.
Yet although the government is all too conscious of the numbers of teenage pregnancies and abortions and sexual disease here — the highest rates in Europe — it continues to allow sex education books for children in secondary schools that describe anal and oral sex in vulgar, matey terms too rude to repeat. Neutral or positive descriptions of sex suggest permission or virtually encourage. Certainly the explosion in sex education has coincided with an explosion in teenage sex (along with abortion and sexual disease). Surely there is some inconsistency here.
Another constant concern is overcrowding. This is one of the most densely populated counties in the world and many fear Britain’s green spaces, especially in the southeast, will soon be concreted over, not to mention the fact that hospitals, roads and public services are stretched to breaking point. So it might seem that there is something to be said for low or even static population growth.
I am not in favour of the uncontrolled mass immigration we have seen under new Labour, but it is surely inconsistent, in an exceptionally crowded country where housing is short and where hopeful immigrants are many, to see a shortage of native babies as a demographic problem.
If babies are merely seen as providers for our old age it is odd to try to get us natives to give birth to more; it will take at least 18 years to get them out to useful work if it can be done at all, what with their illiteracy and low skills, and they will all need pensions and geriatric beds in the end.
A migrant Hungarian or Pole, by contrast, will be well educated, eager to work and ready to do so at once, without 18 years of investment by the British taxpayer. What’s more, they might (unlike most Third World arrivals and their families) choose to go back home one day without staying on as a charge on the state in their declining years. On a purely utilitarian level, a grown-up Pole is surely better than a British baby.
Underlying all this anxiety seems to be a truth that is awkward to articulate among the bien pensant, but well understood. It’s not that there is a shortage of babies. It’s that there is a shortage of babies in respectable, middle-class, middle-income families. The rich and the poor are having plenty of babies. In upper-middle-class circles it is now a status symbol to have four or more children. Among the poor it is perfectly possible to have babies with or without a man or a job; the state will pay. Although it won’t pay much, it will offer as good a life as any other that seems available.
The women who are not having children are what would have been called in the 19th century the deserving mothers; they are hard working, competent and responsible but have come to recognise that they cannot, as feminism once promised, have it all. They either need to work or want to work, or both, but for those on middling incomes it is not possible to have lots of babies as well. It is too expensive and too risky — expensive in childcare and risky in job prospects. The recent IPPR study put out some rather questionable figures about the high opportunity cost — “the fertility penalty” — to women who have children early, but the point has been glaringly obvious for years.
The call goes up, therefore, for universal affordable childcare subsidised by the taxpayer. A nanny at home is for the rich only. Pressure groups and feminists call instead, with at least a hint of realism, for more institutional care for infants and toddlers in subsidised nurseries. Yet evidence mounts up that this kind of care is bad for infants and young children. Any Martian could look up recent studies which show this inconvenient finding.
Meanwhile, those women who do have more babies are what you might call the undeserving mothers and the extraordinary inconsistency, from a Martian’s point of view, is that they are rewarded for it, just as low-income fathers are significantly better off if they abandon their families.
What (broadly) distinguishes those who don’t have babies from those who do is the real cost of housing. Rich women and poor women on benefits are protected from it and it does not affect their decisions about having babies. By contrast, the middling sort of mother is burdened with a high rent or mortgage. On top of that she is highly taxed (unlike the poor or the rich) and increasingly taxed to pay for less deserving mothers. This is ludicrous.
If we want such deserving women to have more deserving babies to pay for our old age — if it is any of our business — there are two radical solutions. One is to allow the building of lots of new homes for sale to bring property prices down so mothers will not be forced out to work to pay the mortgage. The other, in tandem, is to give a tax holiday to cohabiting parents.
This would mean that two-parent families where at least one parent works would be much better off than welfare parents who either don’t work or pretend not to. They would nonetheless have an acceptable basic income. Neither is politically possible, of course. We prefer to live with cowardly, mind-numbing inconsistencies.
www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2058787,00.html
Only the middle class can’t afford babies
Minette Marrin
A sociologist from Mars would be mystified by the contradictions with which we torment ourselves in this country. First we are told that not enough women are having babies and that we are close to a disastrous fertility crisis. (“Britain suffers a baby gap of 92,000 a year,” according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research.) There soon will not be enough young people to support the old and taxes will have to go up.
Next we learn that some women are having too many babies and the government’s best efforts to discourage them have proved an expensive and scandalous failure: “£150m plan has failed to cut teenage pregnancies” screamed a news splash on Friday, based on official figures. Abortions are at a record high, approaching 200,000 a year, with the greatest rise among women in their early twenties.
It was also reported last week that women are planning to have babies later and later — and are then devastated by predictable problems in conceiving. Presumably younger, more fertile mothers are what we need; however, as reported, the government has been spending many millions to stop very young women having early babies.
Yet although the government is all too conscious of the numbers of teenage pregnancies and abortions and sexual disease here — the highest rates in Europe — it continues to allow sex education books for children in secondary schools that describe anal and oral sex in vulgar, matey terms too rude to repeat. Neutral or positive descriptions of sex suggest permission or virtually encourage. Certainly the explosion in sex education has coincided with an explosion in teenage sex (along with abortion and sexual disease). Surely there is some inconsistency here.
Another constant concern is overcrowding. This is one of the most densely populated counties in the world and many fear Britain’s green spaces, especially in the southeast, will soon be concreted over, not to mention the fact that hospitals, roads and public services are stretched to breaking point. So it might seem that there is something to be said for low or even static population growth.
I am not in favour of the uncontrolled mass immigration we have seen under new Labour, but it is surely inconsistent, in an exceptionally crowded country where housing is short and where hopeful immigrants are many, to see a shortage of native babies as a demographic problem.
If babies are merely seen as providers for our old age it is odd to try to get us natives to give birth to more; it will take at least 18 years to get them out to useful work if it can be done at all, what with their illiteracy and low skills, and they will all need pensions and geriatric beds in the end.
A migrant Hungarian or Pole, by contrast, will be well educated, eager to work and ready to do so at once, without 18 years of investment by the British taxpayer. What’s more, they might (unlike most Third World arrivals and their families) choose to go back home one day without staying on as a charge on the state in their declining years. On a purely utilitarian level, a grown-up Pole is surely better than a British baby.
Underlying all this anxiety seems to be a truth that is awkward to articulate among the bien pensant, but well understood. It’s not that there is a shortage of babies. It’s that there is a shortage of babies in respectable, middle-class, middle-income families. The rich and the poor are having plenty of babies. In upper-middle-class circles it is now a status symbol to have four or more children. Among the poor it is perfectly possible to have babies with or without a man or a job; the state will pay. Although it won’t pay much, it will offer as good a life as any other that seems available.
The women who are not having children are what would have been called in the 19th century the deserving mothers; they are hard working, competent and responsible but have come to recognise that they cannot, as feminism once promised, have it all. They either need to work or want to work, or both, but for those on middling incomes it is not possible to have lots of babies as well. It is too expensive and too risky — expensive in childcare and risky in job prospects. The recent IPPR study put out some rather questionable figures about the high opportunity cost — “the fertility penalty” — to women who have children early, but the point has been glaringly obvious for years.
The call goes up, therefore, for universal affordable childcare subsidised by the taxpayer. A nanny at home is for the rich only. Pressure groups and feminists call instead, with at least a hint of realism, for more institutional care for infants and toddlers in subsidised nurseries. Yet evidence mounts up that this kind of care is bad for infants and young children. Any Martian could look up recent studies which show this inconvenient finding.
Meanwhile, those women who do have more babies are what you might call the undeserving mothers and the extraordinary inconsistency, from a Martian’s point of view, is that they are rewarded for it, just as low-income fathers are significantly better off if they abandon their families.
What (broadly) distinguishes those who don’t have babies from those who do is the real cost of housing. Rich women and poor women on benefits are protected from it and it does not affect their decisions about having babies. By contrast, the middling sort of mother is burdened with a high rent or mortgage. On top of that she is highly taxed (unlike the poor or the rich) and increasingly taxed to pay for less deserving mothers. This is ludicrous.
If we want such deserving women to have more deserving babies to pay for our old age — if it is any of our business — there are two radical solutions. One is to allow the building of lots of new homes for sale to bring property prices down so mothers will not be forced out to work to pay the mortgage. The other, in tandem, is to give a tax holiday to cohabiting parents.
This would mean that two-parent families where at least one parent works would be much better off than welfare parents who either don’t work or pretend not to. They would nonetheless have an acceptable basic income. Neither is politically possible, of course. We prefer to live with cowardly, mind-numbing inconsistencies.
www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2058787,00.html
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