I often here that argument, but I tend to wonder about it... as has already been mentioned several times in this thread, raising children in our current culture is *expensive*. I haven't run the numbers, but it seems to me that if you took the money you would spend on raising children and put it in a decent retirement account instead, you'd have a very good chance of having things covered.

Note I'm not saying "hence, nobody should have children". I'm making a point that it seems to me that in our society, almost nobody really *needs* children. And this is where I got my terminology wrong that ukelele corrected me about above; people do of course, by definition, still have "reproductive priorities". They just don't seem to have much "reproductive necessity". So that's where I'm getting my thesis that it ought to be only about personal preference and capability of supporting them for a while.

Of course, this completely ignores social pressures, which are a non-trivial factor that I choose to ignore because I think they're obnoxious. ;)