What the BBC should have told you on Mother’s Day

Shortly before Mother’s Day, the Centre for Social Justice released a report that should have dominated the news. ‘Baby Bust’ projects that 600,000 British women today will miss out on the motherhood they actually wanted. Nine-in-ten young women still hope to become mothers. Yet the birth rate has fallen to a record low of 1.41. The gap between what women want and what they get is widening every year.

You probably did not hear about it. The BBC did not cover it. Instead, on the same day, it published a feature headlined “‘Like a trap you can’t escape’: The women who regret being mothers”. On the eve of Mother’s Day. You could not make it up.

But it is the CSJ’s own data that should command the attention of every C4M supporter. The report is explicit: the baby bust is not about family size. Mothers in the UK still average around 2.3 children. What has changed is the number of women who never become mothers at all. The childlessness rate has risen from 5 per cent in 1970 to 18 per cent today, and the CSJ projects it could reach 30 per cent.

The strongest predictor of this shift is marriage. In 2015, among 30-year-old women who intended to have children, only 23 per cent of married women remained childless by 42 – compared with 81 per cent of never-married women without partners. In the US, three quarters of the decline in fertility can be accounted for by the fall in the marriage rate alone. The evidence is not ambiguous. When marriage retreats, motherhood retreats with it.

The CSJ names what so much of our culture refuses to say. The 600,000 “missing mothers” are not a mystery. They are the human consequence of a society that stopped valuing the one commitment that makes family life possible for most people.

I have written at greater length about the BBC’s role in this story here.

This is why the Coalition for Marriage exists. Not to judge, not to exclude, but to say clearly that marriage – the lifelong union of one man and one woman – is the foundation on which families are built and children thrive. When our culture treats that truth as old-fashioned, it is women and children who pay the price.