Her protagonist picks blue, and is initially delighted, having been told all her life that motherhood is an intolerable burden. Only later does the girl wonder if that’s true, as she looks at another blue ticket plucker:

“She seemed truly happy. Her skin was smooth, her clothes seemed expensive. I wondered what she might do afterwards with her day, where she worked, what her house was like, whether she was bound to anyone or anything, whether she was thankful for her freedom.”

Separated from their white ticket counterparts, blue tickets live in a world where there is no family of any kind. They spend their time partying, hooking up with unattached men, and pursuing demanding careers, assured that they should be “thankful” for their very specific kind of freedom. A freedom from the responsibility and limitations imposed by parenthood, and particularly motherhood. It is a kind of freedom that was almost unknown to our ancestors, but is increasingly the norm in the modern West.

More from this author

Would you like endless pleasure?

By Louise Perry

Mackintosh, 31, does not have children. Nor do roughly 40% of her peers. Some of those women will go on to have children over the next decade or so, but many will not. This fate has not been assigned randomly by the state, as in Mackintosh’s novel, but is, instead, the result of much messier forms of social change — the effects of which have been accumulating over time.

Around 18% of women in England and Wales born in 1972 reached the end of their childbearing years not having had children, compared with only 10% of women born in 1945. Millennials are projected to continue the trend. As of 2019, the total fertility rate in England and Wales is at a historic low of 1.7, and the Covid-19 crisis may lower that still further. All in all, it is quite plausible that at least 1 in 4 people of my generation will not be having children.

Financial insecurity and rising property prices are often cited as reasons for this, and there is no doubt that millennials are not only worse off than their parents’ generation, but also acutely aware of it. I used to agree with the argument that, as one young writer put it, “[y]oung people still need to get onto the first rung on the housing ladder to get onto the wedding ladder and the kids ladder … and that pushes any dreams of 2.4 children well into the distance.” In other words: it’s the economy, stupid.

But I’m not so sure now that the numbers stack up. There is a near-perfect correlation between a nation’s GDP and its fertility rate: globally, poor people have more children, not fewer. The same holds true in this country, since even as the total fertility rate has declined, poorer Britons have continued to have more children on average than their wealthier counterparts, and tend to start their families younger too. Poverty does not preclude childbearing — in fact, it seems to do the opposite.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

An income-rich, asset-poor millennial friend once insisted that she couldn’t possibly afford children; she later reconsidered, recognising that she could, but it would mean buying a house outside London, having fewer holidays, eating out less often — all in all, making sacrifices that she wasn’t prepared to make, at least not in her twenties. The issue isn’t how much money today’s young people actually have, but how they prioritise their spending.

The reality is that declining fertility is not a phenomenon affecting every section of society evenly. When we talk about falling rates of childbearing across the Western world, what we’re really talking about is falling rates of childbearing among graduates.

Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Sheffield University, describes the sharp distinction:

“Society has split into two groups. One group, of women graduates, clustered particularly in London and the commuter belt, is having children very late and the rest are having them at much the same age as their mothers and their grandmothers did.”

This first group of highly educated people, both male and female, is also the group most likely not to have children at all. In contrast, working-class people are more likely to hold on to traditional family values that include a disapproval of voluntary childlessness. In our society, blue tickets are not picked by lottery, but they’re not exactly randomly selected either: there are strong demographic forces at play, with class being the most important one.

So why are graduates choosing not to have kids? Some environmental activists celebrate the decline in birth rates and so-called “BirthStrikers” reject parenthood in order not to further burden an already over-burdened planet. I do know twenty-somethings who are fervent enough in their political beliefs that they have signed anti-natalist pledges, but a vanishingly small number of people actually choose to have children, or not have children, based on such abstract concerns.

I simply don’t believe most of my peers who say that they’re choosing to be childless out of fear for the climate. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, for instance, have committed to having only two children in a display of environmentalist piety, but have made no commitment to reducing their air travel or the number of homes they own. Appealing to the health of the planet is a socially acceptable explanation for reduced childbearing, but not a candid one.

Suggested reading

Will Britain join the European baby push?

By Colin Brazier

No, I see two plausible ways of explaining the rise of the elite blue tickets, neither of which involve climate change or financial insecurity.

The first possible explanation is linked to the fact that sometimes affluence reveals differences within populations that were always there, but used to be invisible. Variation in appetite, for instance, is indiscernible in an environment of food scarcity, since the greedy and the abstemious are equally limited in how much they can eat. It’s only in an affluent society like ours that the abundant availability of cheap calories allows such traits to surface, with some people — but only some people — becoming obese as a result.

Perhaps, like appetite, a longing for parenthood is a visceral thing and you either have it or you don’t. Perhaps in the past there was always some proportion of people who had no interest in childbearing, but had little choice in the matter, particularly if they were women.

We know that voluntary childlessness is linked to personality, which is highly heritable, so there might always be a chunk of people who, given the option, would prefer not to have children. And now, with contraception, and feminism, and the decline of religion, and all of the other factors that have turned our world upside down, that option is newly available to people with the education and means to choose their own path. “Not every woman goes gooey at the sight of a toddler taking their first step,” insists one young writer, “there are others who quite simply do not want kids. Ever.” And isn’t that their prerogative?

This personality-based explanation seems plausible enough, but I wonder if there may be an additional ideological explanation for why rising childlessness is affecting only one section of Western society — perhaps not coincidentally, the same section of society that has most fiercely embraced a liberal individualism that dominates in today’s universities.

Let’s be honest — children are hard work. They scream, they complain, they make a mess. They limit your leisure time, your sex life, your travel, and your socialising. In our economic system, children limit earning potential because they limit mobility and flexibility, especially for mothers (the gender pay gap is actually a maternity pay gap). All in all, kids limit freedom.

More from this author

No one has the 'right' to have a baby

By Louise Perry

If you subscribe to an ideology that privileges freedom above all else, then why on earth would you want children? It is a sure-fire way to sabotage your beauty, your leisure time, and your ability to buy high-status consumables: the things that matter most according to an ideology that prizes immediate and visible success and enjoyment over everything else. Children do offer pleasures, but they are complicated, costly, and delayed. So if you are a liberal individualist and you don’t find within yourself a visceral longing for parenthood, then the solution is simple: opt out.

The most energetically liberal baby boomers succeeded in eroding the stigma associated with voluntary childlessness, thus granting greater social freedom to later generations who have been born into a world in which choosing to be childless is — for the first time ever — relatively normal. Hence the gradual dwindling of childbearing in the decades since the 1960s — from 10% childlessness, to 18%, to (maybe) 25% or more. This is a cumulative social change, not a sudden one.

People used to have children because of tradition, or religion, or social pressure, or just because they couldn’t access contraception. But, unlike their working-class peers, most of today’s graduates are not subject to these pressures any more and so for them the decision to try for children is based on only one question: do you like kids?

Looked at from this perspective, it’s no surprise that so many young graduates are choosing to be childless. It is a perfectly defensible decision in our ideological environment, and any costs will be paid down the track, or perhaps not at all, at least at the individual level.

Suggested reading

Parents don't want tips from the childless

By Sarah Ditum

Birth rates are difficult from a policy perspective, since they are simultaneously of profound national importance, and also profoundly personal. On the one hand, we have environmentalists urging us to have fewer children. On the other, economists warn of a looming demographic crisis if birth rates keep falling. At the centre of the drama are all of us, with our hotly contested bodies.

Will a generation of blue tickets change their minds, as Sophie Mackintosh’s protagonist does? Will they conclude that actually not being “bound to anyone or anything” is not the life they want? Some might, only to find themselves coming up hard against age-related infertility; others might be quite happy to live without children. It remains to be seen what our society might look like as voluntary childlessness is increasingly normalised — maybe even, one day, becoming the majority choice.

It’s quite possible that it might not matter. We could yet find a way of solving environmental and economic problems without fiddling with birth rates, and it may be that a population that spends less time on childrearing will have more time to spend on other valuable pursuits. But it’s worth remembering that speculative fiction — from The Handmaid’s Tale to Children of Men — is consistently gloomy about what happens to a society in which babies are in short supply.

Of course, women in the modern world have options. My GP was happy to prescribe me the Pill when I was a teenager. When I was in my twenties in 00’s London, sexual health clinics plied drop-in clients with great fistfuls of condoms packed in brown paper bags like party favours. My years of prime fertility unfolded in a culture where an active sex life is seen as normal and healthy, and contraception as a basic healthcare right.

More from this author

Why aren't women having more babies?

By Mary Harrington

We seem sometimes to have forgotten that birth control is at least as central to women’s participation in public life as universal suffrage. Today, it’s expected that women will join the workforce on reaching adulthood, and pursue careers on equal terms with their male colleagues. But that couldn’t happen without contraception.

Shorn of the ability to control our fertility, a woman might pay others (if she can afford it) to care for her children, give her babies away to be adopted, or avoid sex altogether to ensure she doesn’t have them in the first place. But as for ‘having it all’ (or ‘having it’ at all without getting pregnant), forget it.

A century or so before I reached my prime shagging years, Margaret Sanger was making this case in a very different world. “Enforced motherhood”, she wrote in 1914, “is the most complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty.”

Sanger is no less controversial today than she was a century ago, albeit for different reasons. Recently Planned Parenthood, the contraception and abortion charity she helped found, disavowed Sanger for her enthusiasm for eugenics, which was considered a progressive cause in Sanger’s time. But 100 years ago, Sanger faced threats and even arrest for campaigning to make contraception and contraceptive knowledge widely available.

In 1929, she published Motherhood in Bondage, a collection of excerpts from letters sent to her by women desperate for help with fertility. The book gives an inkling of what life looks like when you’re poor and your fertility is not within your control: a litany of exhausted, ground-down, ill and impoverished women, many on their seventh or eighth pregnancy in their mid-twenties, begging Sanger for information or help on “how to don’t have more children”, as one correspondent put it. One writes:

My smallest baby is three months old and I’m afraid I’ll get pregnant any time from now on. So please give me some kind of advice because I cannot support what I got and when they are four I don’t know what to do. I’m only twenty years of age.

Sanger was one of the first feminists to campaign for a woman’s right to be, as she put it, “the absolute mistress of her own body”. A century on, in the developed West, her goal has been largely reached. While accidental pregnancies still happen, the vast majority of women are able to access contraception, emergency contraception and — should they wish it — abortion services.

Suggested reading

How the establishment fell for eugenics

By Peter Franklin

The grim condition of those impoverished early twentieth-century women, struggling to feed and clothe an ever-growing brood, is happily a thing of the past. But I wonder if we can take this for granted in perpetuity.

The story of contraceptive manufacturing is, broadly speaking, the story of manufacturing generally: offshored to Asia to reduce overheads, with only branding, administration and R&D still predominantly based in Europe. Durex, once the British Rubber Company, has based its entire condom manufacturing capacity in China, India and Thailand. The vast majority of oral contraceptives, as well as the component ingredients used in their creation, are manufactured in China and India. No one makes contraceptives in Britain.

This is just fine in a situation where relatively frictionless international trade is assumed as a permanent feature of the modern world. But this turns out to have some drawbacks when there’s a political, economic or biomedical shock to supply chains.

It doesn’t even take a pandemic. Last year, doctors were worrying about the impact of Brexit on contraceptive supplies. In February this year, the estimated 3.1 million British women who use the contraceptive pill faced severe shortages, for reasons that still remain unclear.

Then when Covid-19 hit in the spring, India banned the export of pharmaceuticals, including progesterone — one of the key ingredients in the Pill. The ban only lasted three weeks, but still caused shortages of oral contraceptives. According to the global development organisation Devex, the ripple effects of coronavirus-related disruption to manufacturing also triggered a condom shortage in Mozambique and import delays in IUDs to Iran.

Suggested reading

The disturbing history of 'artificial mothers'

By Louise Perry

An optimist might tell me that none of these incidents is likely to be more than a blip. And perhaps they’d be right. Provided, at least, that the global economy stays stable, China stays friendly (and doesn’t go to war with India), global commercial shipping is able to continue, and there are no more surprises in store that threaten the fabric of globalised trade. A year ago I’d have said that scenario looks a reasonably safe bet. Halfway through the madness of 2020, I’m not so confident.

Of course, new factories can be built closer to home, if they seem economically viable. Women’s contraceptive security, though, is threatened not just by de-globalisation but also environmental concerns.

The contraceptive pill is one of the most widely used pharmaceuticals on the planet. 3.1 million British women use it, making it our most common prescribed contraceptive. It works by mimicking the hormones released during pregnancy, and its main hormonal component is a synthetic estrogen known as 17α-ethinylestradiol — a compound that is disastrous for aquatic life. Its presence in rivers and groundwater disrupts the endocrine systems of a range of species, causing intersex conditions in frogs and fish and severely harming their ability to reproduce. It is also difficult and expensive to clean from waste water.

Environmentalists tend to be broadly liberal-feminist in their sympathies, which may help to explain why this issue generally gets soft-pedalled. No one who supports women’s reproductive autonomy will be enthusiastic about confronting the ecological harms done by synthetic estrogens. So the topic remains, to date, mostly a talking-point for the Weird Right.

But there’s a clear trade off between a woman’s desire to be “absolute mistress of her own body”, and our collective duty to ensure oryzia latipes (and all the other aquatic species turned intersex by 17α-ethinylestradiol) can remain even to a degree masters of theirs. Eventually, we will have to confront this issue.

Let’s hope that when we do, science prevails, and we come up with a better way of cleaning waste water. If we don’t, sooner or later the contraceptive pill will be banned.

Suggested reading

Can India keep China at bay?

By Tim Marshall

Such a ban might be hastened by demographic fears. The BBC recently reported a “jaw-dropping” global crash in fertility rates. In the developed West, fertility has been below replacement for generations, but the report predicts that the global birth rate — currently around 2.4 — will on current trends plummet to 1.7 by 2100. Extrapolated long-term, this is an existential threat to humanity: as Professor Christopher Murray, one of the reports’ authors, puts it: “If you can’t [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears.”

I doubt we’ll remain so committed as a species to reproductive autonomy that we shrug our shoulders while the birth rate plummets toward human extinction. Far more likely is that we’ll see growing pressure on women to get gestating. Oryzia latipes may yet find itself championed by pro-natalists, keen to use the ecological downsides of the Pill as an argument for restricting women’s contraceptive choices.

Though not (yet) on ecological grounds, some countries are already restricting contraception as part of efforts to drive up the birth rate. Iran has ceased to offer birth control and vasectomies via state healthcare — a policy that explicitly targets the country’s slumping birth rate. In effect, for Iranian women, worry-free sex has become a bit like cashmere jumpers or safari holidays: nice, but only if you can afford it.

Should contraceptive manufacturing be expensively re-shored, in response to de-globalisation, we might face an analogous situation in Britain: birth control still available, but only as a luxury product.

None of these scenarios is inevitable. But those of us concerned for women’s welfare should take the question of contraceptive security seriously. We should also take seriously the question of why women don’t seem to want to have babies.

Suggested reading

Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

By Paul Morland

The Left tends to blame this on sexism and the immiserating effects of capitalism (see for example Laurie Penny here), arguing that these factors make child-rearing arduous and unaffordable. The reactionary Right, on the other hand, tends to blame the baby strike on the pernicious effects of feminism. They’re both partly correct.

As that “jaw-dropping” BBC article puts it, falling birth rates are partly a result of “more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception”. In other words, they’re a consequence of the increase in women’s choices and as such are — in the article’s words — a feminist “success story”.

But recent research from the US-based Institute for Family Studies also shows that, worldwide, women are having fewer children than they’d like to. This implies that the supposedly ‘free’ choice to have fewer children is indeed, as Laurie Penny suggests, constrained by structural factors.

It ought to be possible for public policy to recognise that unwanted pregnancies are a nightmarish prospect for women — especially given today’s uncertain economic outlook — while also acknowledging that many women wish they could have more babies. Hungary’s birth rate has increased by 5.5% following Viktor Orbán’s introduction of subsidies aimed at encouraging larger families; this implies that state intervention can indeed tip the balance for would-be mothers, without coercive measures such as taking birth control away.

Those Right-wingers who are indifferent to women’s interests, safety or subjectivity might be tempted to leap on the prospect of contraceptive shortages as a straightforward solution to shrinking populations. But this would mean returning women to forms of bondage that Margaret Sanger fought to end a century ago. If we’re to stabilise the birth rate without embracing this kind of anti-women approach, the Right will need to learn from Hungary and embrace an activist, pro-family state.

Meanwhile, the Left will need to get over its obsession with abolishing the family. Both these perspectives, in different ways, treat human reproduction as a matter solely of individual choice. But bringing new generations into the world is the responsibility not just of individuals and families, nor just of women. Rather, it’s on all of us: a shared duty to our collective human future.