The dissertation On the Obligation of Maternal Love: a study on women who opted out of having children is the result of the author’s research on the formation of emotional bonds in the mother s relationship with their offspring. For the last two centuries, maternal love has been assigned to women as an intrinsic response - specific to female gender - and has been conceived as behaviors that every good mother should have. However, until the eighteenth century, the relationship between mother and children did not resemble what we now understand it, deconstructing the idea of a standardized model of love. Conducting a survey on women who chose not to have children sought to investigate the feelings and the reasons that made them take that decision. Based on the Underlying Discourse Unveiling Method (UDUM), of qualitative nature, a survey was conducted with ten middle-class women, without children, between the ages of 34 and 56 years old, living in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The results indicated that the choice for nonmaternity was not so simple for the respondents, influenced by social pressures and ambivalence, creating doubts and, in some cases, causing pain. At the end, we concluded that life projects and the search for fulfillment and personal satisfaction were crucial for the respondents to opt not to be mothers.