Most women in England and Wales no longer have a child before they are 30 [1], official figures show for the first time.
An Office for National Statistics (ONS) report found 50.1 per cent of women born in 1990 were childless by their 30th birthday.
It is the first time there has been more childless women than mothers below the age of 30 since records dating back to 1920 began.
A third of women born in that decade had not mothered a child by the age of 30, for comparison.
Women born in the 1940s were the most likely to have had at least one child by that milestone (82 per cent).
But there has been a long-term trend of people opting to have children later in life and reduce family size ever since, the ONS said.
The most common age to have a child is now 31, the ONS estimates based on latest data, compared to 22 among baby boomers born in the late 1940s.