An egg-freezing voucher for Christmas? Thanks, Mum

With fertility rates falling and motherhood pushed ever later, novelist Kathy Lette wonders whether paying to freeze her thirtysomething daughter's eggs could be the best gift of all.

- Kathy Lette

On Christmas morning, when I ask my daughter how she'd like her eggs, I'm hoping she replies, “Fertilised”. .. because that's the present I'd really like to give her – an egg-freezing gift voucher.

When I get together with women my age, so many of us are singing the same tune, it's like being in a new version of the musical Frozen. Our main refrain is that we're worried about when – and if – the snooze alarm is going to go off on our daughters' biological clocks. My own darling daughter is 32. I'd had two marriages and two children by that age. But she's still happily dating and very much in demand.

And she's part of a trend. Women are having fewer babies, later. The Office for National Statistics reports that the number of births per 1,000 women aged 20–24 fell by about 79 per cent between 1964 and 2023. Overall fertility rates in England and Wales have also dropped to record lows, meaning the average number of children a British woman is expected to have in her lifetime is now 1.44 – the lowest since records began. What has increased, though, is the average age of mothers, with more births occurring in the mid-thirties and beyond.

But eggs have a use-by date. While Rupert Murdoch or Donald Trump could father a child tomorrow, for women, fertility noticeably decreases in the late thirties, and by 40, the likelihood of conceiving each month naturally becomes substantially lower. Yet more proof that God is a bloke.