“You can throw yourself into programs working with kids. You can forge relationships with neices/nephews.”
Nope nope nope. I had a condition that I was told would make it incredibly hard for me to get pregnant. I spent years utterly broken and struggled to be around children.
I’ve somehow managed a spontaneous pregnancy and I feel I’ve been given my life back. I cried with relief at the positive tests, it’s as if the weight of a planet had been lifted from my shoulders. I was no longer condemned to what I felt was a miserable half-life. That’s not to say every childless woman has a half-life, not every women wants children and some are more partial to children but not overly fussed either way. However, in my individual case, the thought of not being able to experience pregnancy, birth and raising a child with the man I love was genuinely life-ruining.
Try telling someone who can no longer eat by month due to a chronic health condition and needs to be permanently tube fed to get a job as a chef so that they can still “throw themselves into the pleasures of food”, and see how well that goes down when they have to watch everyone else have access to something so natural that they have been deprived of.