“I believe that children are our future” sang the late great Whitney Houston in her hit cover Greatest Love of All. Forty years later, it would seem the United Kingdom, joined by many other Western countries, has given up on that belief.
Glancing through recent reports by the Office for National Statistics, we are told we’ve simultaneously reached a record low birth rate (1.44 children per woman) and a record high number of conceptions ending in abortion (29.69%) in England and Wales.
And yet, amidst such news of civilisational decline, University College London research revealed “parents have higher life satisfaction than people without children”. Such a headline begs the question: why then are we not having more children as a nation?
