Certainly nobody should be forced into having children, but the general societal pressure to do so isn't necessarily a bad thing. When you're young, you tend to think the age you are is what you "really" are. You relate to old people as a different species, essentially. Nobody young is aware that they are merely the larval form of an old person, or understands how short that larval period is. This effect has never been stronger than it is in our media driven, temporally segregated world today. Having kids is an almighty pain in the ass, for sure. More work than anyone who hasn't had them can possibly imagine. But it is also rewarding, even at the time, and enormously so later. Moreover, the cost of not having them is much higher than you can imagine during the years when you are busy not having them. The costs of having them are easy to enumerate, while the costs of not having them are diffuse and distant. The thing that is difficult for the young to imagine is that most of the things people want to preserve by not having children are the attributes of youth, which flies away whether you have kids or not. And to have a family around you when you're full grown (i.e. old) is a wonderful thing---literally, the only thing that matters. The benefits of a life spent activity focused on yourself sours with age. You cannot hold onto it anyway. As the poet says, "Who could have foretold that the heart grows old?" Very few mature adults are sorry they had children unless they did a very poor job of being parents. The pressure is good because it helps to save young people from the costs of their limited imagination about the arc of life.