The problem of the survival of humanity is not a matter of ensuring the birth of future generations but of limiting it. The immediate danger to human… - Germaine Greer

Women's magazines sadly remark that children can have a disruptive effect on the conjugal relationship, that the young wife's involvement with her children and her exhaustion can interfere with her husband's claims on her. What a notion- a family that is threatened by its children! Contraception has increased the egotism of the couple: planned children have a pattern to fit into; at least unplanned children had some of the advantages of contingency. First and foremost they were whether their parents liked it or not. In the limited nuclear family the parents are the principals and children are theirs to manipulate in a newly purposive way. The generation gap is being intensified in these families where children must not inconvenience their parents, where they are disposed of in special living quarters at special times of day, their own rooms and so forth. Anything less than this is squalor. Mother must not have more children than she can control: control means full attention for much of the day, then isolation.

There are enough women prepared to boast of having got
a man in a million to persuade other women that their failure to find
a man rich enough, handsome enough, skilled enough as a lover,
considerate enough, is a reflection of their inferior deserts or powers
of attraction. More than half the housewives in this country work
outside the home as well as inside it because their husbands do not
earn enough money to support them and their children at a decent
living standard. Still more know that their husbands are paunchy,
short, unathletic, and snore or smell or leave their clothes lying
around. A very high proportion do not find bliss in the conjugal
embrace and most complain that their husbands forget the little
things that count. And yet the myth is not invalidated as a myth

We could see that our mothers blackmailed us with self-sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with us and to us. The notion of our parents' self-sacrifice filled us not with gratitude but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived and it was our fault.