When I was growing up in the 1990s, it was teenage, single mothers who were the target of right-wing pundits, wanging on about “broken Britain” and the state of the country. Politicians and moralists wrung their hands over what was to be done with this scourge of single mothers. The fear was that irresponsible, young women were having babies – on purpose – to land a council house and claim benefits forever more. Remember that whole thing? 

In 1993, Panorama ran specials on the subject, asking: “Should the taxpayer foot the bill for women who have babies on benefit?” Religious figures regularly spoke out about the immorality of it all. The environment secretary, John Gummer, went on record in 1993 to say, “at one time, children born to single parents were adopted. It is an option we ought to think about seriously.”

That was the same year the Sunday Express called “lone mothers” an “underclass” and “brides of the state”. They polled their readers about banning benefit payments to single mothers. Of the 754 people who responded, 715 were in favour of such action. Mrs Rosemary Christophers, a mother of five from Ashburton in Devon, said: “Benefits to single mothers should be banned. If people realised they are not going to get handouts they wouldn’t get pregnant.” And Wilma Wilson from Strathclyde fumed: “Women who stand for female rights and declare women can cope without men should be shot.” 

Here we are, some 30-odd years later, and it’s no longer single women having kids that the right is getting all het up about, but rather women who don’t have any kids at all. Jeeeez. Make your minds up, lads! Do you want us to have them, or not? We have moved from fearmongering that single women will drain the state dry with their huge broods of illegitimate offspring, to prophesising single women will go one better and bring about the collapse of society by not having enough children in the first place, illegitimate or otherwise.

Last month, Danny Kruger, Reform UK MP for East Wiltshire, casually announced that, “marriage traditionally was the means by which sexual relations between men and women were regulated, and I think we are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy”. Adding: “Yes, we [Reform] have a pronatalist ambition. We want people to have more children, and we think the government should get behind that wish.” The plan to get us all having babies largely boils down to levying financial penalties through tax, i.e. switching the system to account for households, rather than individuals – so those sexually unregulated, social menaces without kids will pay more.

This came hot on the heels of Reform candidate Matthew Goodwin catching heat when a 2024 YouTube clip of him resurfaced, saying: “We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life, and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.” Goodwin has also called for imposing a “negative child benefit tax” on “those who don’t have offspring”. In a separate clip, recorded with controversial right-wing academic Jordan Peterson, Goodwin agreed with the claim that universities have become hotbeds of “politically correct authoritarianism” because they are full of “childless women”.

As a childless woman myself, I must say it’s almost flattering to be considered such a powerful threat to the patriarchy. Most of the women without kids that I know spend their evenings doing aerobics or dipping their nets. The fact we may also be unwittingly bringing about the downfall of Western civilisation is just a bonus to having firm buttocks and brilliant white voile curtains.

So, I’ll be paying more tax if Reform get in, will I? Given that the average cost of raising a child in the UK today is somewhere between £250,000 and £300,000, they would have bring in one a hell of a tax increase if they want to make bearing children the more financially prudent option. No one is going to be throwing out their diaphragm to save a few hundred on tax. But, of course the purpose of such a hypothetical tax hike is to create shame and stigma, rather than financially force women into motherhood. Older women without kids have become the social scapegoats that single mothers were in the 1990s. Basically, it’s all women’s fault – again.

But let’s play the Reform game anyway. Obviously, the targets of a “negative child benefit tax” are socially irresponsible pariahs like me, who just don’t want kids. But what about those who do want them, but can’t conceive? Will they also have to pay more tax? Will we have to submit a fertility test along with our tax returns, so HMRC knows where to send the bill? Perhaps we could speed up the process by having accountants and gynaecologists share office space? “Here is your Government Gateway ID and a cervical swab.”

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People without children are not a threat to society. I am exhausted with this kneejerk, pronatalist rhetoric that views women without kids as the cause of societal breakdown, rather than a result of it. It’s far easier to blame childless women than to look at the wider social, economic, and political factors driving their choices, isn’t it? Let’s ignore the spiralling cost of living, the housing crisis, the encroaching threat to reproductive rights, horrendous levels of domestic abuse, and the ever-present spectre of warfare, and just blame the ones who don’t have kids instead. Let’s make them pay more tax. That’ll solve it!

It’s lazy, misogynistic claptrap that makes women’s reproductive choices the scapegoat for all of society’s ills – again. It wasn’t teenage mothers on the dole who caused the 2008 financial collapse, it was bankers. Just like it wasn’t women without kids who bombed Iran, or invaded Ukraine, or filled the oceans with shit. It’s not us who hiked up the cost of electricity, stagnated wages, and ran the NHS into the ground. These things are not the result of an “unregulated sexual economy,” they are the result of greed and unfettered capitalism.

And then they wonder why we don’t want to have children.

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