There’s never been a better time to not have a baby
Australia's fertility rate has reached a historic low, with many women opting for smaller families or choosing not to have children at all. Economic factors such as the cost of living and housing affordability are significant influences on these decisions. As a result, single-child families are becoming increasingly common in the country.
- ▪Australia's fertility rate has fallen by 25% since 2008, reaching a record low of 1.48 in 2024.
- ▪One in four women aged 18 to 45 report they will not have children.
- ▪Financial considerations, particularly housing costs, are major factors influencing family size decisions.
Sydney Morning Herald publishes from Australia and files mainly under world. We currently carry 3,705 of its stories.
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Record
| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/national/there-s-never-been-a-better-time-to-not-have-a-baby-20260520-p5zz8b.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Thu, 28 May 2026 10:04:08 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T00:08:06.862Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T00:08:06.862Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | yeicIW78A97b |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","dateModified":"2026-05-28T00:04:08Z","datePublished":"2026-05-28T00:04:08Z","description":"Australia’s fertility rate has hit a record low, with more people saying one – or none – is the only way they can live.","headline":"There’s never been a better time to not have a baby","keywords":"Fertility, Babies, Property prices, Parenting, Resolve Political Monitor, Growth Content, Metros Special","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Matt Wade","jobTitle":"Senior economics…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.