Holly Brockwell, a 29-year-old from the UK, explains to This Morning why she wants to be sterilised and never wants children.

A woman who admitted she did not want to have children was mercilessly bullied and forced to shut down her social media accounts as a result.

British tech publication editor Holly Brockwell faced an onslaught of harassment and negative comments via Twitter and Facebook after she wrote a piece for the BBC saying she planned to be sterilised.

"As a woman, there are four little words I can say that invite more condescension than almost any others: 'I don't want children'," she wrote.



"If I say I don't think I'd be a good parent, for instance, people respond, 'Everyone feels that way at first.' If I say I can't imagine ever having the time, energy or money, I'm told I'll 'find a way to manage'. If I say I want to devote my life to my career, they say I'm 'selfish'.

HOLLY BROCKWELL/FACEBOOK UK woman Holly Brockwell temporarily closed down her Twitter account after she was abused for her decision not to have kids.

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"There's no acceptable reason to not want a baby, it seems."

The 29-year-old told the BBC she was worried by the volume of messages she received within half an hour of the story being published on Sunday.



Many were supportive but a lot of the messages - mainly from men - were negative.



Brockwell said she received streams of gender-specific abuse from people who said "things that I can't repeat and I would never say to anyone no matter what they had done".



She even shut down her Twitter account temporarily due to the abuse.

Holly Brockwell/FACEBOOK The editor of tech publication Gadgette was named Woman of the Year by advertising company The Drum.

Wellington Young Feminists co-chair Rachael Wright said it was another example of the criticisms women faced when they made decisions about their lives.

"It just shows how much people think they have a right to comment on women's decisions."

It was a no-win situation for women who were criticised for having children and not having children, having children too young or too old, or too many or too few kids, Wright said.



Men tried to silence women and control their bodies through sexist comments like those directed at Brockwell, she said.



This type of abuse was a reality for most women who wrote about their life decisions online, Wright said.



Sexist bullying put women off sharing their stories online - something that was empowering for others to read.

Holly Brockwell/FACEBOOK The 29-year-old said she was worried by the instant onslaught of comments following her article about wanting to remain childless.

There was also a degree of hypocrisy in the negative comments directed at Brockwell, Wright said.

It was unlikely the critics were the same people fighting for things like gender equality in the workplace and more affordable early childhood education.

Society needed to change the way it talked about women, she said.

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If all women were seen as potentially pregnant it excluded people with fertility issues and trans people.

"We need to be conscious of not criticising individual choices."

Public figures who chose not to have children, like Cameron Diaz and Helen Clark, showed young girls you did not have to be a mother to be successful.

However, it was also good to see mothers succeed in their careers, she said.

In the 1993 book Making Policy Not Tea, Helen Clark is quoted as saying: "Having children has never been something I've wanted to do because I value my personal space and privacy too highly. I cannot think of the sort of life I would want to have where I would want to give up those things for children."



However, "that Clark and her husband chose not to have children was raised during the 1999 campaign and reiterated in every campaign thereafter," wrote authors Linda Trimble and Natasja Treiberg in the 2010 book Cracking the Highest Glass Ceiling: A Global Comparison of Women's Campaigns for Executive Office.

National Council of Women national president Rae Duff said women shouldn't have to justify their decisions.

There had always been a stigma attached to the choice not to have kids, she said.

"There's something in our culture that does put pressure on women to have children... I believe that we should support women to make their own choices."

Duff said the decision was prompted by issues like stay-at-home mothers being undervalued and the difficulty of mothers getting ahead in their careers.

New Zealand was slowly moving towards addressing these issues, she said.

Statistics New Zealand figures show in 2006 15 per cent of women aged 40-44 were childless, while only 12 per cent of the same age group were childless in 1996 and 9 per cent in 1981.

The trend of increasing childlessness was also apparent in other developed countries, Statistics NZ said.

In Australia, in 1981, 9 per cent of women aged 40–44 years had no children; in 2006, the proportion had risen to 16 per cent.

The trend was expected to continue, with a quarter of women born in 1975 expected to remain childless.