‘DO YOU own a TV?’ ‘Time for the snip.’ ‘You’re an animal.’
These are not comments from online trolls. They are things strangers have said to me in supermarkets, cafés and church halls – because I am the father of five.
Here is the absurd part. At this very moment, Britain is gripped by panic about its collapsing birth rate. According to the Office for National Statistics, the total fertility rate fell to 1.41 in 2024, the lowest since comparable records began in 1938. The accepted replacement level fertility rate is 2.1. We have not had so few children in nearly a century.
Experts warn of demographic crisis. Politicians mostly avoid the subject. Think-tanks predict fiscal ruin. Commentators fret about labour shortages and an ageing society.
Yet socially, culturally and even morally, Britain manages an extraordinary doublethink. We claim to love babies – but only in strictly controlled quantities.
If you doubt that, try walking into a middle-class gathering with more than two children. You become a moral spectacle.
The informal script rarely changes:
Baby 1: ‘Congratulations!’
Baby 2: ‘Perfect – a neat pair.’
Baby 3: ‘You will have your hands full . . .’ (nervous laugh)
Baby 4: ‘Do you know how this works? What about the planet? Holidays? Money?’
Baby 5+: ‘What are you doing?’
At that point, reproduction stops being cute and becomes ideological.
A third child is an inconvenience.
A fourth is careless.
A fifth is a provocation.
This is more than social awkwardness. It reveals something deeper. Modern Britain has built a system in which children aresymbolically cherished and practically discouraged.
We tell women they can ‘have it all’, while designing a society in which having more than two children is treated as irrational. Housing costs, workplace expectations, childcare scarcity and the ideological elevation of personal autonomy all push in the same direction: fewer births, later births, smaller families.
Meanwhile, we end roughly a third of pregnancies through abortion, then look to immigration to fill the demographic gap, a policy choice that changes a society far more dramatically than any family choosing to have four or five children ever could.
Nothing illustrates this moral framework better than Prince Harry’s declaration that having more than two children is ‘irresponsible’ because of the environment. It wasn’t merely a lifestyle preference. It expressed a worldview now dominant among Britain’s professional class.
In that worldview:
Two children are acceptable.
Three is indulgent.
Four or more is environmentally reckless and verging on immoral.
The symbolism matters. Here is a man whose carbon footprint rivals a small town, yet it is ordinary families, often living frugal lives with modest impact, who are told they are the planetary threat.
This is not really about carbon. It is about control. It is about who counts, and who gets to reproduce without social suspicion.
The irony is striking. The very families who choose to have more children are providing what policymakers insist the country needs: future workers, taxpayers, carers and citizens. They are making the long-term sacrifices the demographic debate supposedly demands.
Yet they are met not with gratitude but distrust, treated as though they are irresponsible for doing the very thing society says it wants more of.
My own family has often been treated as a cultural irritant, as though five children represent not commitment, resilience and love, but recklessness.
None of this means the state should dictate family size. But we should at least be honest about the trade-offs.
A society that treats larger families as eccentric, wasteful or selfish is not neutral. It is choosing demographic decline as its path.
And the decision to celebrate babies only in carefully rationed quantities carries consequences far beyond awkward comments in supermarket aisles.
Britain insists it is running out of children. The truth is more uncomfortable:
We are not running out of children. We are running out of the courage to welcome them.
