For most of my life, the examples I saw of women without kids seemed to be solely those who were unable to have them, either for health reasons (i.e. infertility) or due to circumstance (i.e. they hadn’t met a partner yet, or until much later in life). As such, I don’t think I fully appreciated that there were women without children who had deliberately chosen this path — at least not where it concerned women who I thought of like me: namely, heterosexual, and in a long-term
