Perhaps the oldest and most important group of unconscious fantasies have to do with the oldest and most important group of questions first developed by children. Where do babies come from? How are they made? Is my body capable of making a baby? Recently we have learned that the questions include: Did I make myself or was I made by my parents (Rittenberg and Shaw, 1991)?

These quandaries, and the multiple fantasies to which they give rise, have important and far-reaching repercussions for us all, but perhaps most poignantly for women, the child-bearers. As it happened, most of the papers we received for this issue of the Journal had to do with one or another aspect of the childbearing process in reciprocal interaction with unconscious fantasies. From this nucleus we were able to gather the following small collection of clinical papers which we hope will make a modest psychoanalytic contribution to the current intense discussions concerning abortion, infertility, and motherhood.