The Office for National Statistics has revealed that the number of women over 40 having babies has trebled in two decades.
In 2009, there were 26,976 live births to women aged 40 and over, almost treble the 9,336 in 1989 and almost double the 14,252 in 1999. The 35 to 39 age group had an even bigger rise of 41% in only 10 years. However, the overall trend in the number of births is falling. It is the first yearly drop since 2001. Experts believe the drop might be resulting from foreign-born families returning home during the recession, or professional couples deciding against having children at a time when money is tight.
The ONS figures show that the fertility rate (the average number of children per woman in England and Wales) increased steadily over the past decade following a slump in the 1960s and 1970s and a plateau throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Immigrant mothers, many from the new Eastern European members of the EU, drove a baby boom that led to a record 61.4 million population in Britain by mid-2008.
These figures tally with earlier statistics showing that overall immigration is now dropping, with a 50% increase in the number of Eastern Europeans returning home recorded in the 12 months to December 2008. However the proportion of births to mothers born outside Britain has held up, rising from 24.1 per cent in 2008 to 24.7 per cent in 2009.
The relatively poor east London borough of Newham had the highest fertility rate of 2.87 children per woman, while more affluent Westminster had the lowest - only 1.18.
Most surprisingly, the biggest drop in fertility rates in England and Wales was among under-20s, with a 2.3 per cent fall from 26.0 live births per 1,000 women in 2008 to 25.4 in the following year. The number of births among women under 35 also fell.
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