I'm not a woman, but everyone I know with kids likes to remind me that I "don't know how demanding having a child is until you have one" and I like to remind them that I know full well how demanding and all-consuming it is, how your life is so upended that your biology changes to cope, how you cease to be an self-determining individual, and all because I actually paid attention and made the choice NOT to have a child based on others' accounts. I didn't wait until after I had a child before figuring out if it was worth the effort.