For various reasons, I've thought very long and hard about what I think of as "human sexual morality." A great deal of our historical cultural norms, such as expectations of monogamy, virginity prior to marriage and
shotgun weddings, boil down to the fact that sex is a profound human drive and very often has unintended consequences. This includes both pregnancy and disease.
You talk about women and their lives as if what they want is or should be the driving factor in their lives. I don't think that's accurate at all.
A serious career woman I was close to for many years had serious fertility problems. After many years of intervention, she managed to have one child in her mid to late thirties. She had read enormous research and concluded that infertility was a driving factor in the lives of many career women.
Careers and children are both serious commitments. Studies show that every dollar invested in our small children for things like preschool saves multiple dollars down the line on things like prison.
I enjoyed being home with my sons. They both have special needs and I have a serious congenital defect that wasn't identified until my mid thirties. Getting a diagnosis was extremely empowering and allowed me to be able to more effectively pursue school, work and even a divorce at long last.
But to a large degree being a homemaker was not something I chose. To a large degree, it was a circumstance foisted upon me by circumstance beyond my control.
I'm not a feminist. I see feminists as people who feel women are entitled to a career as if a spiffy title with a big salary is a prize in a Cracker Jax box that unfairly is handed out to men arbitrarily based on the dark heart of society being a sexist pig. This attitude is fundamentally disrespectful of both what it costs men to have a real career and what it takes to adequately raise healthy kids.
Society is not going to solve these problems as long as it continues to chase this insane delusion that children are a casual choice no harder to get or avoid than picking your lunch from a menu.
Our current mental models throw everyone under the bus, men, women and children alike. Many women soak up a lot of the damage to lessen it for their children which is the morally and practically correct choice given the shitty state of the world. But we shouldn't be designing a world like that. It's evil to design a world where that's basically the norm and not some bizarre stastistical outlier.
I wish most self-proclaimed feminists would go die in a fucking fire. They are generally worse than most self-proclaimed Christians who all too often are just assholes giving Christianity a bad name.
I would like to see the birth of a post feminist world where we deal realistically with the thorny issue of human sexual morality, including the fact that sex can lead to pregnancy and this can have huge consequences for the lives of the parents. I hate labels but I tend to think of it as a humanist model, which to me means a model that is humane and cares equally about men, women and children.
The feminist narrative mostly cares about women having serious careers and it mostly cares about empowering a subset of very privileged women to live their lives like very privileged men. The reality is that when you have a very privileged woman who has a serious career and also children, it's usually some less privileged woman raising her children under a title like nanny.
Our current feminist narrative pretends that it wants equality for all. It actually doesn't.
It actually wants equality between a small subset of very privileged upper class women and very privileged upper class men and it expects that so-called equality to come largely at the expense of lower class women working as maids and nannies to make it possible for a few upper class two-career couples to "have it all."
Career paths must be reimagined if we are ever to escape this bullshit. Our current career paths are posited on an implicit assumption that the worker is a heterosexual man with a wife and kids to support and her labor is freeing him up to put all his time and energy into the job while she worries about making sure he eats healthy and arranges to make that possible for him. That pattern served humanity well when most families had multiple children and it improved quality of life for men, women and children.
The world has changed and our mental models are failing to adequately catch up. We aren't going to invent better ones while chasing bullshit delusions based on ridiculous ideals that cannot actually be achieved and are actively undermining the claimed goal of creating a better world.