Searching information about this subject often leads to personal stories from women making the choice to live childfree and women stating they either always wanted to have children or experienced a sudden 'baby fever'. Often this baby fever is understood to be a biological urge.
In this article a link between hormones and the need for own offspring is made a couple of times, but also contradicted.
In the context of evolutionary adaptedness, all women were exposed to babies and infants, and the ‘default’ setting for the female body is to have experienced both nurturing and pregnancies by the early twenties. Rotkirch therefore suggests that longing for a baby develops out of hormonal changes evolved to prepare women for motherhood. These might be triggered by falling in love; the ‘nesting’ behaviour associated with settling down; exposure to infants or the aging process. Conversely, however, Kravdal has found evidence in Norway of a demographically significant cohort for whom reproduction and finding a long-term partner and ‘settling’ down’ are quite exclusive (Kravdal 1997).
In the same article, the effects of hormones on human intercourse and attractiveness between men and women is briefly explained. However, to me it seems that the urge to have sex is something different from the urge to have babies or to become a parent. I would like to know if there are hormones or other biological changes in women that cause something like 'baby fever' or if it is rather more of a more psychological or social environment phenomenon.
Other relevant articles are often not accessible to me or prove too difficult to understand with basic biology knowledge.
