Hello and welcome to another episode of iWay with Jermina Jamil, a podcast against shame.

I hope you're well and I hope you're still listening even after you've seen the title.

I hope that you know that this episode is incredibly inclusive to lots of different people,

even if it might not seem so at first. We are interviewing Ruby Warrington this week who is a

British-born author, editor, podcaster, and the founder of Numanist Books, and she has a new book

out called Women Without Kids, the revolutionary rise of an unsung sister herden. It's very, very good

and she's very, very cool. However, we are in this conversation and she in this book,

we're not just talking about people who don't want to have children or people who can't have children,

or people who feel too traumatized by their childhoods to have children or people who aren't

financially ready or they don't have the health. I personally don't want to have children,

I've been very open about that and that's purely because I just don't want to, there's no other reason,

I don't want to, I don't want to be a parent, I don't have that instinct in me, doesn't resonate with me

at all. I like to help other people in different ways and use my kind of natural

caring instincts in that way. But we really get into not just the importance of acknowledging

that not everyone is built to be a parent or should be a parent, but this is very much so a fight

for those people who are and for those people who want to. This is a fight against the idea that

women are just predisposed to this one sole purpose of a miracle, maternal nature and to be

these perfect, idealistic mothers. It's fucking ridiculous and it's harmful, especially to people

who want children because then they feel like they have to live up to these ridiculous, unrealistic

expectations of what kind of a perfect parent they're supposed to be and I literally don't know

anyone who doesn't fall short of that. It's too much pressure, it's not real, it's fantasy

and it's not fair on people who have to work really, really, really fucking hard and make mistakes

...