@Catandhiskit actually I think you're right. People are keen to say "well she doesn't have kids but she's got the most amazing life" as though a woman has to justify her choice.
@Hearhere I actually think the fetishisation of motherhood, that a woman can't be complete until she's a mother, is one of the most nefarious cons going.
I see it as a similar process to the tories getting the working class to vote for them (stay with me here!)
By which I mean that for a woman all aspects of her life changes when she has a child. Her body changes, irrevocably actually, although perhaps mildly but often in quite harmful ways. Her earning power is affected, her stamina, her independence and autonomy in ways that a man is not.
So, in order to get us to take all of this on, what do we do? Why, tell women that if they don't do this they'll be incomplete, that motherhood is the only possible path to self realisation, even the only path to love and fulfillment. And so we end up where we are now with women feeling like men are doing them a favour when they get them up the stick and men still getting to call the shots, because how could a woman ever complain about the status quo when everyone knows that if she didn't have kids she'd be somehow lacking?
Women without kids are the innocent bystander casualties in all of this, cast as the spectral horror of how empty a woman's life must be if she doesn't experience all of the aforementioned 'joy'.