Maternity pay hasn’t ‘gone too far’, Kemi – life is already impossible for mothers

Kemi Badenoch's musings remind us that small businesses are wary of employing young women who could get pregnant
Kemi Badenoch’s musings remind us that small businesses are wary of employing young women who could get pregnant - Bloomberg

Any woman who has a baby these days is completely mad. By bringing life into the world they, by all objective measures, will be making their own lives immeasurably harder. No wonder about a fifth of women are choosing not to. Those who do have babies are having them later and often having fewer children than they would like.

According to the Office for National Statistics the birth rate across England and Wales fell from 1.55 children per woman in 2021 to 1.49 in 2022. To maintain our population, the replacement rate, known as the R-rate, needs to be at least 2.1 children per woman.

The falling birthrate is a global phenomenon. It’s a problem economists and politicians worry away at but, quite frankly, is it all such a mystery as to why this is happening?

Having a child is basically deciding to take a stake in an uncertain future. It requires an irrational amount of optimism that somehow it will work out. Yet all around us are the signs of just how difficult it is. Kemi Badenoch’s musings on maternity leave, in which she suggested that pay had “gone too far,” are a reminder of this. She claims to have been misinterpreted, but nonetheless, it remains the case that small businesses are often wary of employing young women who could get pregnant. If that does happen, then once is considered permissible; twice, excessive.

A friend of mine with one child was interviewed by a female boss who also had one child and was told to her face that leaving things as is was the only way to get on. Having more than one child would make her unemployable. Maternity leave is spoken of as some sort of favour rather than a statutory right. The nuclear family with 2.4 kids and a male breadwinner petered out some time ago and all the nostalgia that is churned out by populists cannot bring it back. Families need two incomes to live on. The only people to have lots of kids are the very rich or the very poor.

I am of the generation that was told we could have it all, which of course meant doing it all. It meant women sitting in staff toilets with breast pumps expressing milk for their babies left in expensive nurseries. It meant lying about your child’s illness. It meant never feeling on top of it professionally alongside feeling never good enough as a mother. It meant overcompensating in daft ways. I still see that all around me. Endless activities. Expensive holidays. Organic mush.

We also had the absurd concept of “quality time” – “special” time you spent to make up for the fact that you didn’t get home in time for anything but a rushed dinner and bedtime. But instead of “quality time,” children really need quantity time: they need to know you are there, whether they are toddlers or stroppy teenagers. Even if they think, as they get older, they don’t want to actually spend it with you.

Maternity leave for the self-employed or those on short-term contracts is a joke. I should know. I have three children and between them had eight weeks’ leave. I was “lucky” enough to be able to work at home with them on my knees. But even I could not manage to write a piece on a trolley in full labour when the Left-of-centre magazine I was working for asked for a film review.

They had only given me two weeks off, based around the due date – but my baby was two weeks late.

So when I see my daughters’ generation deciding to earn less but have more time with their little ones, I get it completely. When I hear friends in their late 30s or early 40s coming to a decision to remain child free, I respect it enormously. I always consider that my life would have been great without kids. Great – and very different.

It is as though a concerted effort has been made to make everything as difficult as possible for mothers. Childcare costs are astronomical. There is ever more parenting advice, which makes many mothers feel they are inadequate somehow. The loneliness, the boredom, the exhaustion and the often traumatic experience of childbirth itself remain smothered by pink and blue cuddly blankets and awful “gender reveal” parties.

The unexpected joys of parenthood are there too of course. But no one really explains to you that parenthood does not end at 18. We have a generation of thirty-somethings still living at home.

Motherhood is venerated in the abstract but in reality, mothers are non-people who bring up the next generation for free. Out of love. Which would be fine if we didn’t also have to pay for anything ever. But of course we do pay, from nursery nurses to home help.

Across the world, when they get a choice, women are refusing this role of motherhood. It always amuses me that around the Vatican is an area of Italy with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. In countries where there are pro-natalist policies, such as Sweden, things improve but only marginally. We are an ageing population who will have to rely on immigrants to care for us if our dwindling birth rates remain below the R-rate.

When a woman decides not to have kids, they are making a sensible choice economically. One would have thought a Conservative leadership candidate such as Badenoch would respect that. But Conservatives also preach “family values”. And it’s a circle they can’t square if they make it so very difficult for women to both produce families and finance them at the same time.

If you think it’s a man’s job to do both, then someone needs to manufacture the men to do that. As long as there is a severe shortage of them, there will be a shortage of babies. These are the new facts of life.