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Ambivalence about motherhood has probably always been present due to the extreme dichotomy between the immediate satisfaction of producing another human being and the life-long responsibility of being a good parent. Abortion and infanticide were used in early times especially when economic or social conditions made children intolerable burdens. It has been said “if procreation had not been put under the domination of passion, it would have ceased because of the burden it entails.” Only recently has it been possible to separate sex and procreation because of the availability of a variety of improved contraceptives and the increasing ease of legal abortion. Women are now more in control of pregnancy than ever before and are thus faced more openly with decisions about the size of the family or whether to have children at all.
In the past women often “let happen what would” according to man's desire, putting the responsibility on him in spite of the price they paid, or they refused intercourse, which took a heavy toll on marriages. Decisions about family size are now usually shared between mates but, in general, women have more stake in the outcome because it makes much more difference in their daily lives and seems to be more intimately connected with their feminine self-esteem. Male self-esteem has been largely won in the competitive outside world and whatever nurturant or domestic interests they had, were largely irrelevant in the “man's world”; or even held against them as signs of dependency. Since women have been programmed, especially by Victorian society, to see motherhood as their most unique and valuable function, this new power to regulate family size causes mounting anxiety as they must choose between the traditional child-oriented role of their