Children and Graduate School

I've read hundreds of articles, books, and posts citing that graduate school is a terrific time to have children because you have flexibility and good benefits.  The thing is, I've only heard this opinion cited by people who never were in graduate school or are way past it and nostalgically think back to graduate school and with that beautiful thing called "short memory" think having kids at that point in their career would have been great.  It must fall under that, "there's never a good time" or "grass is greener" category of wishful thinking.  What I would really like is to hear that same sentiment expressed by a well-established and successful woman scientist who did actually have kids in graduate school.  As far as I can tell, science is a terrifically unfriendly career for mixing children.  My department is especially male dominated (we have ONE female professor) and while sure, the flexibility might be there (while I currently work 10-12hr days I think that I could probably get the flexibility if I had a reason) and the benefits are terrific, it seems like you'd be risking early career suicide.  I know for a fact that two current female graduate students (of course this ONLY applies to female graduate students as not surprisingly, any male who gets his wife pregnant is viewed quite positively) who did have kids during their training were instantly perceived as less serious, less dedicated, and less likely to be great scientists, despite the fact that one of them is indeed a very top notch PhD candidate.

And today those views/opinions were reaffirmed when I went to a Neuroscience student lunch.  It was a bunch of advanced female trainees and we all shared the horror stories from our respective departments about students and post-docs who had kids.  Unanimously it never worked out well unless you didn't really care about staying in academia..in that case the impact on your career was lessened quite significantly.  

But that puts me in quite a fix.  First off, it'd be "easier" relatively and with better benefits to start trying sooner or later...but then I better be damn sure I'm not interested in an academic career because that would almost certainly be the end of it.  Luckily I'm pretty certain I'll be going to medical school so I probably shouldn't be too worried, right? And wouldn't it be better now then during medical school?  Because for sure I'd like to avoid at least avoid third year of med school and 1st year of residency.  But as go round and round with this debate I always get mad that extrinsic factors like reputation are enough to impact my husband and my reproductive plans. And the fact that our reproductive decisions alone, not how hard I work, nor number of papers I publish, or impact of the work I do are enough to derail an academic science career.