Commenting on former Olympian Victoria Pendleton, who ‘says she won’t be pressured into marriage or a family’, Emma Palmer explains in the Telegraph ‘why it can be the hardest thing to admit’, saying: ‘Like Victoria Pendleton, I know how hard it is to trust your instincts and choose not to have children’.
The UK is to ban the ‘“barbaric”’ trade of importing shark fin products; although the practice of ‘shark finning’ was banned by the UK nearly 20 years ago, according to environment minister Lord Goldsmith the continued importation of such products ‘“may still be inadvertently contributing to the practice”’ which, as he explained, ‘“involves slicing the fins off living sharks that are then tossed back into the sea to die painful deaths”’.
From October next year the minimum age for playing the National Lottery will be raised to 18, although online sales to under-18s will cease in April; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/12/08/under-18s-barred-buying-lottery-tickets-government-gambling/ the Telegraph comments that ‘[n]ot that long ago there was little dissent from the notion that adulthood began at 21, and that was in a time when it was commonplace for people to leave school and start work at 14.
There have been calls to lift the ten year limit for storing frozen embryos and eggs after an embryo frozen 27 years ago in the US was born after being ‘adopted’ by a childless couple; believed to have set a record in this regard, Molly Gibson’s sister Emma, who as an embryo was frozen on the same day, was born in 2017.
Katherine O’Brien, Associate Director of Communications and Campaigns for abortion provider BPAS says the charity has carried out a ‘shocking new survey’, which ‘discovered a rise in mothers choosing to terminate pregnancies based on money worries’; in October, BPAS ‘surveyed 240 women with two or more existing children’, who had ‘ended a pregnancy this year, to understand how the pandemic and financial pressures had influenced their decision’, and the ‘results were heartbreaking’.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that in 2019, nearly half of women turning 30 were childless; analysing data for women born in England and Wales in different years, researchers discovered that last year, 49 per cent of women born in 1989 - the most recent cohort to reach 30 – had no children.
