London - Arguments between husbands and wives over whether to have children have led to a wave of ‘body clock divorces’, lawyers said yesterday.
Marriage break-ups are increasingly a result of the frustration felt by successful career women when their husbands refuse to start a family, they claimed.
As many as one in ten divorces now involve a wife who believes her years of fertility are running out and who is anxious to find a partner willing to support a family, according to the analysis by a leading family law firm.
Pregnancy rates among older women are rising at unprecedented speed. Women over 35 are more likely to give birth than under-25s.
The family law firm JMW Solicitors said yesterday that unfulfilled ambition for babies is now contributing to one in ten divorces.
Lawyer Holly Tootill said: ‘Some of our clients have begun their marriages with the firm intention of having children soon afterwards, only for career ambitions to cause that desire to be put on hold. However, many women’s willingness to resolve the matter only seems to grow more acute as the years pass.’
‘A number of women have told us that they had become aware of the ticking of their body clock and, in cases where their husbands had developed a resistance to starting a family, they expressed a compulsion to divorce and find someone more favourable to the idea.
The firm said that more than a fifth of the 300 divorces it deals with each year involve couples with an age gap of at least seven years, and that one in seven of all marriages in England and Wales are between a couple with an age difference greater than ten years.
Around one in five women now reach the age of 45, regarded as the point where fertility is at an end, without having children.
Miss Tootill said that attitudes to having children can prove a fundamental difference between marriage partners.
‘It can represent such a significant obstacle that spouses feel almost unable to compromise and that, sadly, results in many going their separate ways,’ she said.
‘Some try to avoid dispute by trying not to mention the subject at all, but putting the discussion off doesn’t make it disappear altogether.’
Daily Mail