Only 4 of 16 women at a Spanish company lunch are mothers

Four mothers among 16 colleagues: the collapse already here

A company lunch. Ten men, sixteen women, all aged 29 to 48. The subsequent count yields the figure: only four of them have children, one with two and three with one, and all four are Spanish. The issue of birthrates came up at the table, and the conversation shifted, according to the account of the person raising it, toward growing discomfort with children—noise, inconvenience, limitation—that this person struggled to accept.

The anecdote is not statistical. But it serves as a snapshot of a trend that demographic analysis has been documenting for years: the decline in fertility in Spain is no longer a future hypothesis; it is the defining antiestéticature of an entire generation.

How many Spanish women under 40 have no children?

The figure circulating in the most pessimistic reading is stark: around 70% of Spanish women under 40 neither have children nor plan to have them, and many of those who are mothers have only one child, nearing the limit of the fertile age. It is an estimate, not a census, and should be treated as what it is: a general direction rather than an exact measurement.

The country repeatedly appears among the world’s worst birthrate indicators, with more mothers over 40, according to the debate. The delay in motherhood has an inescapable arithmetic consequence: fewer fertile years for a second or third child.

The real cost of having a child: salary, housing, and working hours

Here the numbers get tight. In the material discussed, a provider standard that sounds like science fiction today is mentioned: 4,000 euros per month, a permanent job, and a mortgage paid off in five years. Against this ideal, the actual labor reality described in the debate is different: most employees earn between 1,000 and 1,900 euros, with temporary contracts, and apartments cost around 300,000 euros.

The conclusion drawn by part of the analysis is not cultural but material. Raising a child requires two stable salaries, affordable housing, and a support network—grandparents, public daycare, flexible hours—that does not always exist. When one piece fails, the decision is postponed. And postponing, in reproductive biology, has an expiration date.

The alternative cited for those who want to be parents without a partner is surrogacy abroad, with an estimated cost of around 100,000 euros. For most, a door slammed shut.

Birthrates among foreign origin: disputed figures

Part of the debate argues that the decline in native birthrates has been partially offset by birthrates among migrant-origin populations, citing figures ranging from just over half of births to 20%, depending on who calculates it. Other voices lower these estimates and note that fertility among migrant families also tends to decline with years of residence.

The problem is methodological. Depending on how the nationality of the parents is counted, the children of naturalized persons appear as born to Spaniards, artificially lowering the percentage. Those defending high figures point to public kindergarten schools with a majority of students from foreign parents; those lowering them argue this data is exaggerated. No round figure from the table is verified, and that is the fact that should weigh most.

Work as a substitute for family

A secondary thread runs through the entire conversation: the idea that women’s full entry into the labor market—necessary and not disputed in terms of rights—has been accompanied by an illusion. The illusion consists in selling professional careers as a full substitute for other forms of life, when the diagnosis of those careers is much less bright: stress, precariousness, long hours and the vague feeling of having exchanged one form of slavery for another.

Here lies the issue of children as an inconvenience. The underlying complaint seems to be not just the child, but a lifestyle that demands continuous performance and penalizes any interruption: maternity leave, sick leave, leaving at five.

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Twenty-six people at a table and only four mothers. If that proportion were representative of anything more than a specific company, the demographic winter would cease to be a prediction and become the present. The discomfort is not the number. It is that no one at the table found it strange.