Child-free by choice, not childless

A recent BBC News article asked a question that would once have seemed strange: why are so many women choosing not to have children, and why are they so at peace with it?

The numbers behind the piece are striking. Research from the Centre for Social Justice suggests around three million women in the UK aged 16 to 45 are likely to remain childfree. If women in that age bracket were having children at the same rate as their grandmothers, 600,000 more of them would be doing so. Meanwhile, ONS figures show births in England and Wales fell for the fourth year running in 2025, to their lowest level in nearly half a century.

The reasons the women interviewed give are not new, but hearing them together is clarifying. Housing costs. Childcare that swallows a salary. A parental leave system that, as one interviewee puts it, makes it harder for women to live a life beyond motherhood. Careers that feel precarious well into your thirties. And, beneath all of it, a quieter shift: the sense that parenthood is now a decision to be made rather than a default to be followed.

What stands out most in the article is not regret but certainty. As one woman, Jess, tells the BBC, “I would rather regret not having kids, than have kids and regret them.” Others describe finding communities online, where hashtags like #childfree gather hundreds of thousands of posts, less as an influence on their decision than a validation of it. Some cite the climate. Some cite the state of the world. Some simply never felt the pull and have stopped apologising for it.

None of this is straightforward, though. Falling birth rates carry real consequences for the economy, for care, for how societies sustain themselves. For some people the barrier is not choice but circumstance, whether that means the cost of IVF, the demands of surrogacy or adoption, or relationships and finances that never quite lined up. And plenty of people still want children very much. The question is what happens when the conditions around that desire keep getting harder.

These are exactly the tensions we will be pulling apart at LIFI26. Are kids still part of the plan? brings together a panel including Dr SJ Beard, Yousra Samir Imran, Betty Mukherjee and Vicky Pattison, hosted by Laura Hamilton, to debate the cultural, economic, scientific and emotional forces reshaping modern parenthood.

It promises to be one of the most personal conversations of the festival, because whichever side of the question you sit on, it is a question almost everyone has had to answer.

Are kids still part of the plan? takes place on Saturday 10 October, 2pm to 3.30pm, in the Courtyard Theatre at Leeds Playhouse. Tickets are on sale now and selling fast.