"Must ... have ... children."

I suspect for almost as long as humans have been around, that's been a mantra.  Children are necessary to provide labor for family and society, children are necessary to care for parents in their old age, children (sons) are necessary to inherit the fruits of a lifetime, children are the evidence of virility and proof of godly favor and human success, children are a promise of future love that's supposedly automatic.  Children have always been a commodity of sorts.  And women, the bearers of children, have been another commodity for most of those millennia, whose labor has traditionally been deemed of less value than men's.

Even now, one of THE big questions for a newly married couple is "and when are you going to start a family?" as if they hadn't already.

Complicated, troubling questions of society's values.