There is another factor: people in wealthy countries are having fewer children than they say they want. This so-called fertility gap is small but not insignificant. It suggests that if people in the UK, the US and Europe had the number of children they wanted, the fertility rate would be just over two children per woman, or above the replacement rate. Perhaps, as the American journalist Anna Louie Sussman has argued, falling birth rates are “less a choice than the poignant consequence of a set of unsavoury circumstances”. “What we have come to think of as ‘late capitalism’ – that is, not just the economic system, but all its attendant inequalities, indignities, opportunities and absurdities – has become hostile to reproduction,” she observed. Those in the wealthy, industrialised West have never had so much freedom to choose what their families will look like. We are no longer as burdened by the assumption that you simply must have children; the legalisation of gay adoption and advances in reproductive technologies have opened up more options for same-sex couples. And yet the flip-side of this freedom is that millennial and Gen-Z lives are characterised by instability: insecure employment; expensive, short-term housing; impermanent relationships (they are more likely than previous generations to stay single). Even the most economically secure will puzzle over how parenthood can fit into their lives. The world of work remains structured on the assumption that each worker is buttressed by a housewife who can deal with all the inconveniences of being a human being – the cooking and shopping and cleaning. This leaves working parents struggling to organise childcare, when every option costs so much and the short school day in no way maps on to a work day. It is rarely acknowledged that these are structural problems rather than evidence of some personal failing. I don’t feel ready, people say instead. Not yet.