These women said no to having kids - here's why
Jess King always assumed she would have children. To her, it felt like a natural path all women eventually followed. But as she got older
Jess King always assumed she would have children. To her, it felt like a natural path all women eventually followed. But as she got older, she couldn't shake a persistent feeling that she wasn't ready. With time, her doubts deepened. "It turned into 'Am I not ready for this, or do I not want this?'" she recalls.
Everyone she spoke to with children said they'd been really sure about it and they had a maternal urge. "I didn't have that and that made me start questioning it." Like Jess, more and more women in the UK are choosing not to have children.
Research by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) suggests around three million women aged 16 to 45 are likely to stay childfree. If women in this age bracket were still having children at the same rate as their grandparents, 600,000 more of them would be having children.
According to data from the Office for Statistics (ONS), births in England and Wales fell for the fourth year in a row in 2025, to their lowest level in nearly half a century.
The BriefWire