“Having children is something like a visual tag in Tunisia. If you walk in the street alone with your husband and you don’t have a child who completes the ‘frame,’ people would ask, ‘When are you going to have children? Why don’t you have children? How is your health? Are you OK?’ Something is missing for them in the picture,” Nacyb Allouchi told Al-Monitor.

Allouchi is a 34-year-old woman originally from Ain Draham, a mountain town in the governorate of Jendouba, in northwestern Tunisia. Since getting married, she has been living in Jendouba, her husband’s town, which has around 50,000 residents and is considered a conservative town in the Tunisian countryside, not far from the Algerian border. In 2013, Allouchi co-founded Rayhana, an association for women in Jendouba.

“Even if I am the president of an association with multiple activities, in our society a woman is first of all the daughter, then the wife and the mother,” Allouchi said. “I can be perceived as active or complete only in relation to these roles and activities.”

Before having their first child, Allouchi and her husband, Adnan, had spent five years of marriage without having children. “It was not a choice from the beginning, but I found it important to spend all this time with my husband,” she said. “On the other hand, I realized that during these five years, all my neighbors were pitying me, thinking that I am sad and they did not come to visit me often.”