> I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice? What do you think your future holds?

> I see no reason why women would ever want children. What's society providing them that they need to make this sacrifice? What do you think your future holds? If we are entirely realistic, I think in 50-60 years, and perhaps much sooner, we'll almost certainly be dead. On our way out everyone and everything we've ever known will also be dying. Best friends we'd thought would last to the end will fade and disappear long before. And that's just the start. Because well before the end our bodies will begin to fail, with our minds often enough not far behind. And, without family, a very likely scenario is that we simply end up alone. In Japan there are so many people dying completely alone, often unnoticed until a neighbor or service worker smells the rot, that they have a term for it: kodokushi - lonely deaths. [1] South Korea has followed suit with godoksa. By raising a family we not only get to fulfill our ultimate responsibility in the continuance of the species, but also you in many ways provide some continuance of ourselves. And as you age we will always have family, such that we will never truly be alone in this world. It seems to me that the masses of people not having children today is vaguely familiar to the masses of people taking out 6 figure loans to pursue random degrees, unlikely to benefit their ability to provide a living for themselves. They certainly know what everybody is saying about such decisions, but somehow think it won't apply to them. And in any case the consequences are so far removed from the present that it can sometimes be difficult to take them seriously, but that doesn't mean those consequences don't exist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi ------------ Edit: As some odd coincidence, this just popped up on the frontpage of HN. It feels relevant enough to link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327432