ABSTRACT
Those who believe that pregnancy and childbirth are ultimately natural, should examine their own attitudes and general social responses to the childless. Badinter (1981) has provided one of the more thorough critiques of the ‘myth of the maternal instinct’ in bearing and raising children. Clearly, there is a biological basis to sexual behaviour and conception but this should not be seen as predominant. If reproduction were biologically based, all women with partners would be continually bearing and rearing children from their early years until menopause, this is far from the case in most societies world-wide. Rather than simple biological drives, there are clear social pressures at work here. The negative evaluation of childlessness combined with the positive evaluation of having children is known as ‘pronatalism’. It is difficult to underestimate the power and effectiveness of pronatalism. Those who cannot conform, such as infertile couples, will undergo arduous and expensive treatments, including the risk of multiple births, to conceive.
