Sophie Hallwright

Just a heads up in this episode, we'll be touching on some fertility challenges.

So if this topic hits too close to home, we totally understand if you need to sit this one out or proceed with care.

We came across a story that we were originally going to cover in the Curve Weekly and essentially the headline was that US birth rates have hit a record low in 2025 and

But what's quite interesting is that while there's all these media headlines that are talking about the fact that, you know, women are having less babies and we've got this fertility crisis and there's a whole lot of fear mongering going on.

Actually, if you look at the statistics, 88% of women who are 45 today are mothers.

And that's actually more than 20 years ago.

So today's conversation originally, we were going to unpack a lot of these statistics.

where we're going to talk about the financial implications that this can have.

So whether you choose to have kids earlier or later, because there's so much to consider with this conversation in terms of personal finances, financial planning, as well as looking at the whole economy and what's happening.

And we recorded this conversation this week.

We edited it and we were really excited about putting it out in all honesty.

And then Vic sent a note this morning to our team Slack saying,

And it said, guys, I'm feeling a little bit worried about this episode.

I feel like perhaps we haven't done it justice.

And so rather than making a decision in the echo chamber of the curve, we sent this episode to a bunch of people we really trusted.

And that was mothers.

People have had difficulty with fertility, people of different ages, and what came back was really interesting.

And I'm so glad that we paused before putting this out.

What it made us really realise is that Vic and I have a specific perspective, experience, angle to bring to this conversation, but...

We're also two mid to late 30s women who don't have kids, and we're both in heterosexual relationships.