ON March 13 – the Friday before Mother’s Day – the Centre for Social Justice published ‘Baby Bust‘, a report projecting that 600,000 British women alive today may miss out on motherhood they actually wanted. Nine in ten young women still hope to become mothers. The ONS confirms the total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.41 in 2024. The CSJ calculates a ‘birth gap’ of 30 per cent, with 831,000 people turning 50 in 2024 but only 595,000 babies born.
You probably did not hear about it. No identifiable standalone BBC News website article or feature covering the report has appeared. Our national broadcaster had other priorities. Namely a 1,500-word feature headlined ‘Like a trap you can’t escape: The women who regret being mothers‘. It promoted the piece on social media, where it drew hundreds of critical replies. Instead of covering a demographic crisis, the BBC gave prominent space to a piece whose own evidence undermines its thesis – and thus revealed something important about the role it plays in the very crisis it should be reporting.
Its maternal regret article relies on a 2023 study conducted in Poland which estimates some 5 to 14 per cent of parents regret their decision to have children, a review article which synthesises several methodologically incomparable surveys – different countries, different age groups, different question wordings.
The more important point is its arithmetic. If 5 to 14 per cent of parents experience some regret, then 86 to 95 per cent do not. But the BBC devoted a feature-length article to the minority experience and ignored the majority one entirely. The lead case study featured is of a pseudonymous woman, Carmen, who came from a background of violence and dysfunction. But further data unsurprisingly finds the regret rates to be higher among single parents than married ones: 27.3 per cent versus 9.8 per cent. And that adverse childhood experiences, depression, and anxiety were also strongly associated with parental regret.
The BBC’s article however did not mention marriage once. Even the therapists quoted made the case against the BBC’s framing without apparently realising it. They repeatedly stated that regret often reflects ‘isolation, exhaustion, or lost identity’ – failures of support, not failures of motherhood as a vocation.
The far larger and more painful form of regret that the BBC also ignored is the regret of women who wanted children and never had them, the highest figures among those who experienced fertility treatment failure. Or the similar regret found among couples whose fertility treatment did not result in a child. Or that involuntarily childless women’s regret intensifies with age.
The CSJ’s huge figure of 600,000 ‘missing mothers’ just did not fit the narrative the BBC wants to tell.
Nor is this an isolated editorial misjudgment. Between 2023 and 2026, the BBC published a series of prominent features sympathetic to negative experiences of motherhood or to child-free lifestyles, among them: ‘I felt like a freak because I didn’t want children‘ (April 2024). ‘The adults celebrating child-free lives‘ (February 2023). ‘True cost of becoming a mum highlighted in new data on pay‘ (October 2025).
In the same period, not a single piece of the BBC’s coverage of Miriam Cates – the most prominent parliamentary advocate for pro-natalist policy – featured conversion therapy, smartphones and the trans debate, or substantially addressed her work on demographics or declining birth rates.
Where are the features on women who regret not having children? The BBC has occasionally covered involuntary childlessness – ‘When Childless Isn’t a Choice‘ (2014), ‘Fifty and Childless: Finding a Way Forward‘ (2018), and ‘I Didn’t Give Up, I Let Go‘ (January 2026). But every one of these frames childlessness as a private grief to be accepted, not a structural failure to be challenged. Where is the feature celebrating motherhood with comparable emotional depth and social media promotion? It simply does not exist.
The CSJ report reveals something the BBC’s framing actively obscures. The birth rate crisis is not primarily about family size. According to Shaw’s analysis in Nature, mothers in the UK have averaged 2.34 children since the 1970s. What has changed is the number of women who never become mothers at all. The childlessness rate has risen from 5 per cent in 1970 to 18 per cent today, and the CSJ projects it will reach 30 per cent.
The strongest predictor of this shift is marriage. According to the CSJ, the average age of first marriage has risen from 22 in 1970 to 31 today, closely tracking the rise in the age of first birth. Lyman Stone’s analysis of US data shows that 75 per cent of the decline in American total fertility can be accounted for by the fall in the marriage rate – and the CSJ argues the same dynamic is at work here. BCS70 data following British women to age 42 found that only 23 per cent of married women who intended children at 30 remained childless – compared with 81 per cent of never-married women without partners.
Meanwhile, CSJ polling finds two thirds of young women believe they can safely delay children until after 35 and that it is possible to have a baby ‘at any age’ thanks to medical advances. The data says otherwise: Australian national registry figures cited in the CSJ report show IVF success rates at age 42 are just 6 per cent per cycle. Risks TCW reported back in 2018 on the 40th anniversary of IVF.
Yet for decades, the cultural message to young women has been: do not rush into marriage, do not have children young, prioritise career and self-fulfilment. Women internalised this message. The structural barriers reinforced it: housing costs as a proportion of income roughly tripled for young adults compared with the Silent Generation. The fiscal system transferred wealth from young families to pensioners, and the UK marriage tax allowance was cut to a derisory £252 per year while Germany’s Ehegattensplitting – its system of joint marital taxation – is worth up to 18,000 euros.
Now that women are reaching their late 30s without the families they wanted, the BBC’s contribution is to normalise the idea that motherhood was never worth wanting in the first place. And when the CSJ documents the resulting catastrophe – 600,000 missing mothers, an OBR-projected fiscal cliff that would push government debt to 274 per cent of GDP by 2074, a state pension age that may need to reach 75 for today’s schoolchildren – the BBC has not given it anything like comparable prominence.
This is not impartial journalism. It is part of the mechanism. The BBC’s framing tells young women motherhood is a trap. Those women delay or avoid motherhood. The birth rate collapses. And the BBC reports the collapse as a mystery. On the Friday before Mother’s Day 2026, a responsible public service broadcaster would have led with the CSJ’s findings. Instead, it ran a feature about maternal regret. That tells you everything you need to know about where the BBC’s institutional sympathies lie – and why, when it comes to the baby bust, it is not just failing to report the story. It is part of the story.
