Having a child is optional for individuals, but not for society, and so it's really only "pseudo-optional" for individuals: there is some distributed portion of requirement on everyone.
I wish there was more discussion about how society should recognize and handle this. Much of modern society is orthogonal to parenting and raising children, I would love to see it addressed more in the public discourse -- maybe even "disrupted" by tech so we can be thrice better parents, citizens, and workers.
I mean, I see government having a role here. Both in developing pro child development resources and policies. Europe is way ahead of the US for example. Some US states are way better than others as well.