Alarm bells on late parenting

Feeding her 4-week-old baby Oliver, Helen Scurrah is the picture of a contented mother. "When I met my husband, I knew I wanted to have children but we wanted some time for ourselves first," she says. "After three years, I began to think, ‘I really would like to have a baby. And we had a son. I feel lucky."

Scurrah, from Poole, Dorset, isn't just lucky to have a healthy son. At 41, she had postponed trying to conceive until an age when chances were very slim.

Loud and clear

Fertility experts would consider Scurrah's attitude to motherhood shockingly laid-back. Recently, the first study was published tracking the supply of eggs from the ovaries from a woman's birth to the menopause. Researchers at St Andrews and Edinburgh universities discovered that, by the age of 30, an average woman has just 12 per cent — barely an eighth — of the eggs with which she was born. By 40, only three per cent of the two million original eggs remained. The message was clear. If you want children, it's best to start as early as possible. Yet, as Scurrah, a member of the online support group Mothers35plus, points out, life is rarely that simple.

"These warnings presume an awful lot — that a woman has a great career and has chosen not to have babies because of her lifestyle. But usually a woman is childless because she hasn't met the right man, because she's not in a financial position to have a baby or she is just not ready."

A couple of generations ago, it was far more straightforward. You left school, married soon afterwards and babies almost inevitably followed. Today, however, many twentysomething men and women are still living with their parents. Sally Gimson, of the Family and Parenting Institute, says: "The middle classes do not aspire to having children young." The average age for a woman to have her first baby is 29.

According to Dr Tom Kelsey, the researcher of the St Andrews study, "Many women are putting off babies for social and cultural reasons who would have problems conceiving even if they started now. I've worked in an assisted-conception unit full of women in their thirties and forties, who were desperate to get pregnant but couldn't. If they had started earlier, they could have had a large family. Yet the fastest rising number of women having abortions are in their thirties. It's a huge risk given that it may be their final chance to conceive but they think they have forever."

Bleak news

Dr Kamal Ahuja, scientific and managing director of the London Women's Group, the largest fertility clinic in the UK, reassures clients that, for women younger than 37, his clinic has success rates of about 50 per cent. After that, however, the news is bleak. Between 35 and 40, about 30 per cent succeed; after 40, this declines to 12 per cent.

The consequences are not just for individuals but for society. Late parenthood means a surplus of old people and not enough workers, which could further stymie the economy. On the other hand, more teenage mothers would mean a population — and economic — boom.

According to economist Dr Ros Altmann, "Women will presumably finish having their families when they are younger and then have more years of employment ahead of them, their children will also come into the labour force and add to growth."

Scurrah laughs when I ask if she could imagine conceiving at 25. "No. I can't imagine it happening, even at 35. There are advantages to having children young but I'm glad I waited. But that's easy to say with hindsight. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to end up childless."