Thank you for your reply. I have not anticipated it, so I appreciate your effort to come back to me. I have a lot to answer, so this comment got long again.

I congratulate you on having come to an intimate insight and realisation in terms of your reflection on parenthood. The reasons for this are none of my business, as I can neither know nor assess whether you have done me a service or whether the opposite might be the case. I see it as an un-answerable question.

As the mother of a son, I can tell you that my view of motherhood and parenthood is constantly changing. Since my views are temporary and not fixed for eternity, there is nothing that I judge as successful or a failure overall. I am still alive and in he middle of process. I welcome people who support me in solving family conflicts without knowing everything better but ask me difficult questions.

If you yourself believe to discover an absolute failure in the fact that having children is bad per se and for the overwhelming majority of humanity, I ask you about the horse's foot of this view?

People talk a lot when the day is long. You can give as much credit to that as if someone says they'd rather eat noodles than rice. You can care less if I want to be liked by you because I choose to have a child or not. You can like me or not like me, that's not something that needs to influence my or your decision.

I see a contradiction in what you say, for it it seems to me that you aim to create another, for me more frightening pressure. By transferring intimate and private conflicts from family to "society". Which would be even more difficult to break away from. If people decide for or against having children, then it shall be entirely their own business, each individual's one. But not the business of the general public.

If you want to make it the public's business, don't you end up exactly where you want to get away from? The pressure then would come from the opposite direction allegedly to your advantage, while it was seen as a former disadvantage by you as long as you counted yourself amongst the pressured ones.

The moment organisations are set up with the supposedly noble aim of doing something "for humanity" in and of itself, one may ask what "humanity" is their business at all. Millions of individuals with whom these world saviours have not the least to do?

If you don't want to have a child because you think it might not really be wanted and loved by you, that is a very personal decision. What makes you think it has to be different? Is it because someone around you turned up their nose at it? So what? What can they do other than turn up their nose or judge you negatively? They can do nothing but accept your decision, whether they like it or not. They have no power over you. They can't make you think what they think.

What would be the next step? Pass a law that people can only have one child or no children at all when a certain population is reached? And what do you think the consequence should be if people don't comply? Have you thought this through? For the question lingers "what if I don't comply?"

Because where there is an official rule that wants to determine who can have how many children, do you think that such a rule would improve the coexistence of people, that there would be less conflict between them?
As far as family planning would be ordered from above, there would need to be an apparatus to police that. Is that what you want? That people who find such an order unacceptable and incompatible with their own worldviews about being human should obey it? Instead of mitigating conflicts, would you not multiply them many times over? What if you change your view one more time yourself?

You could indeed start to worry about pressure when it is supported by the state or when, for example, large companies start to intrude on the privacy of their employees. But you can ignore something like peer pressure if it is not decreed by some crazy world saviours pushing it on governments.

I see that there is social pressure, both in one direction and in the other. But this pressure is without threatening consequences as long as there is no official permission to punish someone, for example with fines or with the manipulation of the sexual organs through, for example, the sterilisation of men and women or prison sentences. No one who has put pressure on you has actually fined you, forced you to become pregnant through having ordered you to have sex and dragged you into bed, or ordered violent fertilization, or threatened you with prison. None of the peers who criticised you were able to bring your life choices to court, denounce you or bring them to the attention of the police.
Because it was not in their power to threaten you in this way.

All the peer pressure people can do is talk and judge. Nothing more. If you don't like their judgement, you can try to reach a reasonably satisfactory outcome through dialogue or deepening the relationship. If you don't succeed, it's nobody's fault. Not even yours. Then you can look for other friendships and build and maintain other relationships. Many of us have difficult families of origin, me as well as you. My story is neither easier nor more difficult than yours.

But where the family is made common property and the idea prevails that this would also eliminate conflicts, I get the horrors.

I would like to emphasise that I respect your decision and would not want to over power you for anything in the world. That is what I mean by live and let live.

I wish you peace with whatever desicion you make.