THE IDEA BEHIND CHILD ZERO
Readers often ask me where I get inspiration for my novels. Given the bewildering times we’re living through, there’s no shortage of dystopian material.
As governments around the world increasingly fret about plummeting fertility rates, I began to wonder why so many young people are making the decision not to have children. And how far governments might go to change their minds.
Headlines have been warning us about declining fertility rates for years. The fertility rate in England and Wales has dipped to 1.39, the lowest in almost fifty years, and well below the replacement rate of 2.1: the average number of births per woman required to keep population numbers stable. We’re not alone.
Over two thirds of countries now have a fertility rate below the replacement level, an issue that governments are attempting to address through a range of top-down policies.
Some are offering financial incentives such as tax breaks and baby bonuses.
Others are using propaganda around reinstating conservative family values to take long-fought-for reproductive freedoms away.
There are many reasons for this baby-bust. Not only are people deciding to have fewer children and to have them later in life (being childless at 30 in the UK is the new norm), many have made the decision to be permanently ‘child-free’.
In a 2024 YouGov poll, 28% of British 18-40-year-olds who didn’t already have children said they definitely didn’t want them.
The number one reason was cost: children were “too expensive”.
The number two reason was concern about “the current state of the world”.
It’s easy to see why. Frankly, if I was a young woman considering my options right now, I’m not sure how I’d feel about embarking on a family either given the daily reports of climate chaos, conflict and imminent destruction from AI. The UK now has four times as many dogs as kids under five: pets seem to be a safer bet. So what exactly is going on?
Finances are a key obstacle: rising housing and living costs, job insecurity and stagnant wages, along with global instability fuelled by political and economic uncertainty and climate and environmental concerns. Some people question whether it’s morally right to bring a child into this troubled and divided world, arguing that the planet and Earth’s other species would welcome a quiet, steady decline in human numbers.
Then there’s the challenge of finding someone to settle down with. We keep hearing about the relationship recession and dating fatigue, and the stats bear out a significant rise in singledom. If you haven’t met the right person, or you can’t afford to live together, then how can you start a family?
Almost a third of UK 20-34-year-olds still live with their parents.
Add to that the pressures of modern parenting: the myth you need to be perfect parents with a perfect child no matter how much you’re juggling, amplified by social media churning out impossible role models and you have the perfect storm.
Bearing a child has become, as one journalist put it, “a radical act of hope”.
How does the saying go? We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Blunt interventions by the state in people’s reproductive choices don’t tend to work out well. China scrapped its One Child policy ten years ago, but still has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world at just 1.0. Teetering under the strain of a rapidly declining workforce, China is struggling to support its ageing population. Young citizens appear immune to the government’s baby incentives. So now they’ve introduced a tax on contraceptives.
But let’s not be complacent. A Reform Party candidate proposed imposing a negative child benefit tax on UK couples who don’t have offspring.
If the carrot doesn’t work, try the stick.
The reality is, it’s a tough time to be a child or a parent. Whether we believe in encouraging people to have a family for economic reasons or to benefit from young people’s energy, optimism and creativity is it really a government’s place to mandate who should or should not have kids?
Or, as in Child Zero, open the floodgates to interventions that go significantly further?
You can read more about these dilemmas and other themes in the book next
Photo credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Declining fertility worries governments, particularly chancellors. If the proportion of working-age people keeps going south, who’s going to boost the economy and deliver the cash to pay for pensions, healthcare and everything else?
One answer might be a change in immigration policy, following Spain’s example who are welcoming migrants to boost their workforce and their birth rate. But in the current political climate that doesn’t seem likely elsewhere.
All of which made me wonder, if fertility rates continue to plummet, how far might governments go to reverse the trend?
Most of the pronatalist policies featured in Child Zero to raise the fertility rate are being implemented in countries right now. Motherhood medals, baby bonuses, tax incentives. State-sponsored dating initiatives.
And other, more sinister tactics. Restricting access to contraception and abortion, through financial or legislative penalties.
State-sanctioned kidnapping of another country’s children.
There are some policies I didn’t include, like writing to every 29-year-old reminding them the clock is ticking and they’d better crack on (yes, really: that’s just across the Channel). Or paying Russian schoolgirls to have babies. Or reclassifying abortion as homicide: bills are currently under discussion in several US states, some of which enforce the death penalty.
