Middle class and pregnant at 21? There's absolutely nothing wrong with that!

By SOPHIE JONES

PUBLISHED: 16:26 EST, 28 November 2012 | UPDATED: 13:00 EST, 6 December 2012

The colour had drained from my mum’s face. She looked panicked, concerned. ‘What on earth’s the matter, Sophie?’ she asked, as I stood next to her tongue-tied, pale, apprehensive.

I believed the news I had to impart was joyful, but I knew that mum would take a different view and, as I struggled to speak, her anxiety grew.

‘Whatever’s happened Sophie? Are you ill?’ she asked, unnerved by my silence.

I paused, took a breath then said quietly, my eyes lowered, afraid to meet her gaze: ‘No mum, I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh Sophie, you’re not!’ she cried, and in that instant it was as if all the hopes and dreams she had cherished for me — her bright, newly-graduated, only daughter — had been destroyed.

Young love: Sophie Jones and husband Ben are looking forward to becoming parents

The fact is mum was shocked because I am just 21, and middle-class girls like me from solid, loving homes do not get pregnant at such an early age.

Mothers as young as me are more often than not those who left school at 16; those without with prospect of fulfilling careers; those who have decided their sole route to fulfillment is through procreation.

So mum was shocked. All she saw was a wealth of wasted opportunities; a costly education frittered. 

Mum’s initial reaction has been echoed by my friends and hers. It seems incidental that I am not a feckless teenager who fell pregnant after a one-night stand. On the contrary, I had been with Ben, 22, for five years. He’s now my husband and the only man I’ve ever loved and the first man with whom I’ve had a relationship.

WHO KNEW?

The average age of women giving birth in England and Wales is 29.5 — a year older than it was a decade ago - 29.5 in 2010 compared with 28.5 in 2000. 

The figures from the Office for National Statistics, revealed women are also giving birth to their first child later on - aged 27.8 last year compared to 26.5 in 2000

It is also, apparently, beside the point that we both want our baby desperately; that we intend to be responsible parents and that Ben — a graduate trainee with an aircraft company who gained a distinction in his master’s degree — intends to work his socks off so we can afford a mortgage.

Our peers judge us harshly. I graduated this year with an upper second in history from Newcastle University and disapproving friends believe it is more important that I forge ahead with a career than be confined to the house looking after a baby.

One even whispered: ‘Are you actually going to keep it?’ Her reaction shocked and saddened me. My pregnancy was a surprise, but I had no thought of ending it because it happened slightly earlier than planned.

For I consider raising a child to be a positive privilege and the most important job of all. The irony is, if I had been born into my grandmother’s, or even my mother’s, generation, my news would have been celebrated.

When my mum became pregnant with me, her third child, at the grand old age of 35 — six years after the birth of the younger of my two brothers — my grandma Peggy was horrified. ‘Oh Sarah!’ she wailed. ‘Whatever have you done?’

Furious: Even though Sophie and Ben are married, their friends and family do not approve of the pregnancy

Although mum was happily married — as she still is — to my dad Gary, Grandma Peggy felt she was simply too old to be pregnant. Women of granny’s generation expected to do their child-bearing in their 20s. Leaving it later was considered risky, ill-judged; even slightly indecorous.

Yet today the tables have been turned — and, it seems, in becoming pregnant too early I have breached an unwritten social rule.

So I find myself in a kind of limbo. At my ante-natal class the other mums-to-be are all in their 30s. And when I go to work — I have extended my university vacation job and have a part-time post in a café — I’m aware that I’m in a world remote from my friends who are pursuing their challenging post-graduate careers.

For although in my grandmother’s era, women of her social class had children while they were still in their physical prime, today it seems de rigueur for intelligent women to defer motherhood until their fertility is in perilous decline. 

Indeed, last month, a survey revealed that female graduates are not likely to start a family until they are 35, while women who do not go to university become mothers, on average, a decade earlier.

The older mums are taking a risk: women of 35 are six times more likely to have problems conceiving than those ten years younger, according to a study by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

So those who choose to give their careers precedence are gambling with their fertility: if they leave it too late they may not be able to have babies at all. 

The Royal College survey issued sobering facts about deferring parenthood: women in their 30s and 40s are far more likely to suffer complications such as pre-eclampsia, ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage or still-birth.

Childhood sweethearts: Sophie and Ben have been together for five years but the baby wasn't planned

Yet so many women persist in postponing motherhood in the mistaken belief that they have as much control over nature as they do over their careers.

So why do women who embark on motherhood at the most propitious time — when they are young and healthy — attract censure? 

Opinion is consistent: only irresponsible single girls living on benefits have babies at my age. 
But I do not fit the stereotype. I was raised by loving parents in a traditional nuclear family. My mum and dad, both 55, are teachers. My brothers Jonathan, 28, and Stephen, 27 — both of them single and childless — are a web designer and a chemist.

The difference between my siblings and me is that I was fortunate enough to find the partner with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life when I was just 16. 

Ben and I went to school together on the Isle of Man where we were raised. He was in the year above me, and a year after he began his degree at Newcastle University, I joined him to study for my degree.

Everyone said it wouldn’t last. But as our peers leapt in and out of relationships, we stayed steadfastly together. And I fail to understand why it is considered more likely that a couple in their late 20s or 30s will forge an enduring relationship than two people of our age.

Ben and I were on holiday in Dubai when I discovered I was pregnant in May this year. It was a surprise — we had planned to start a family later — but we were overjoyed. We considered ourselves fortunate.

 'The stark face remains: women in their 20s are physically better suited to child-bearing than older ones.'

From the outset, however, we were worried about the reaction of our friends and family. 

I envisaged my parents’ disappointment that I had not even embarked on a career when pregnancy interrupted my plans. 

I’d hoped to join the police service and no doubt will still do so when the time is right; it’s just that, for me, raising my family will take precedence.

And in truth, once mum realised how happy we were, her apprehension dissipated. Both she and dad were thrilled with the idea of becoming grandparents in their mid-50s. They will be young and active enough to revel in their new role. 

They are also being wonderfully supportive: while Ben and I save for a home of our own, we shall live with them in the rural cottage where I was brought up — and there can be no better start than for a child to be raised in a small community, surrounded by a loving extended family.

Of course, as young parents we are bucking every trend. More and more women are opting to have children late in life, and 27,000 babies were born to mothers over the age of 40 last year; almost three times the figure for 1989.

Women today, of course, have careers, and I would not want to revert to my granny’s era when they could not combine a profession with motherhood. 

But although we now have equality in the workplace, our bodies have not adapted at a similar pace. The stark fact remains: women in their 20s are physically better suited to child-bearing than older ones.

What I’m hoping, then, is that we recognise this and remove the stigma that persists in attaching itself even to responsible young parents like Ben and I.

Meanwhile, we are looking forward with excitement to January when our baby is born. I may not — yet — have a career as a police officer to look forward to, but I still feel, in my role as mum-to-be, I am preparing for the very best job in the world.