Explainer-in-brief: Britain’s baby challenge

The UK is seeing out the perils of an ageing society already. We have a social care system stripped down, which, in turn, is preventing the NHS from functioning as elderly patients stay in hospital beds because of lack of adequate care elsewhere.

And Britain is only set to get older with the average age for women having their first baby at 30.7 years. The risks are a smaller workforce, with less tax receipts, holding up an increasingly larger population reliant on the state.

The problem, according to the women’s health ambassador Professor Dame Lesley Regan, is that people simply don’t know they won’t be fertile forever.

It’s not of course, the out of reach childcare costs, inaccessible housing and uncertainty in a tumultuous economic climate.

For the former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, we need TikTok videos to remind women their fertility drops off steeply at the age of 35 and men at 45.