Yeah, I don't think it's a reflection on a person one way or the other either...as I said earlier, I'm not sure how much sense it makes to try to impose a moral dimension on these sorts of questions, yet if you're asking for "reasons" much more substantial than "I just do/don't want to, that's all," it's almost a given that a self-aggrandizing dimension is going to creep into the answers at some point. Almost. And all the more so if you're going to get into speculatively attributing reasons to people who have made different choices from yourself.
I was primarily asking the "good reasons" question rhetorically--I could take a stab at it I guess, but Irvine seemed to be mostly interested in hearing from childless people, which is fine; I was just curious about some of the themes that kept coming up in people's answers, and one of them was this idea of not having children for the "wrong" reasons, which made me wonder what people who said this thought the "right" ones might be, and also what the criteria for making that distinction are. It's an appealing idea, that if you could just be sure you're doing it for the "right" reasons, well then you're guaranteed to be a great parent and never feel down in the mouth about it--I'm just not sure it has any basis in reality.
Another thing I was curious about is this idea of not wanting to make someone else suffer--what kind of "suffering" is being referred to here? Are we talking about abuse in the classic sense (physical, sexual, psychological, neglect)? I mean, I certainly wouldn't advise someone to have children if they sincerely believed they would harm them somehow (not that I would ever "advise" someone to have children anyway), but I wonder what sort of relationship between "wrong" reasons to have children and children's "suffering" is being implied here. If it's that people having children because "that's what everyone does" leads to more abuse, then frankly the available data don't back that up, at least not in the US, which has been tracking child abuse longer than any other country: child abuse of all 4 types named above has trended strongly up, not down, in the roughly 35 years since USDHHS started tracking it (NIS 1,2,3 & 4)--physical abuse up 42%, sexual abuse up 83%, etc.--even as fertility rates declined by more than a third, and no one involved in the data collection thinks changes in reporting incidence even come close to accounting for these increases. Furthermore, where abuse committed by parents is concerned (most of it, sadly), there's no correlation to parental age--older parents are no less likely to abuse their children than younger ones. So from a US demographics perspective at least, there really isn't any support for the idea that more freedom to have children for the right(?) reasons, or to wait until later and have fewer, is leading to net benefits for children's welfare--at least not if you're measuring the latter in terms of abuse, classically defined. But perhaps some other kind of "suffering" was meant?
The other thing, I guess more as an observation than a question, is that while I can understand rolling one's eyes at the "I'm a mother" boast the way Dr. Laura or Peter Pan Lady package it, is there something pathetic or shameful in general about offering that as one's primary self-description? I don't think there is, but a lot of women do seem to feel that way--honestly, I'm often reluctant to even ask the simple "So, what do you do?" conversation-starter of women I don't know, because it makes me wince when I get, as I often do, a nervous laugh and an apologetic-sounding "Oh, I'm just a homemaker" as if it's a foregone conclusion that, welp, there goes me any chance of me finding them the least bit interesting. What's to be ashamed of? No, I don't necessarily want to hear their children's entire life stories, but then frankly I don't have great interest in hearing much about the careers of plenty of people I meet either, nor do I expect them to have great interest in hearing about mine; that's not really the point of the question, it's just one of several ways to go about feeling for commonalities to discuss: a mention of Little League might lead to a discussion about baseball; a reference to family camping might lead to a discussion about the best places to hike; a mention of a trip to Disney World might lead to a discussion about consumer culture, Florida vacations or whatever. If you start out assuming that someone whose life is centered on their children and says so couldn't possibly have any thoughts or interests worth your time, then it will likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy.