When did it all change from women being valued as mothers?

Society no longer encourages women to be mothers. Motherhood is almost a dirty word unless you are a gay male who wants to adopt a child, and then it's all about getting access to that wanted child and the mother discarded. But we used to value children, didn't we? I don't know what it was like in New Zealand, but in the United States they were considered a child-centred society after WWII.

By the late 1950s however, women who saw motherhood as service to society and who dreamed of scores of little kids to nurture, were suddenly caught in the crosshairs.

A new wind had blown in from academe. Chic "mental health" professionals were suddenly sneering at homemakers, even part-time working moms, accusing them of "momism" and "smother love," that was producing weak sons and aggressive daughters.

I had been ignoring the sneering columns in the press and ladies magazines about motherhood being parasitical and wasting women's talent. I had four great daughters and worked part time as a songwriter and television performer. Wherever my "little women" and I wandered, we were greeted by admiring glances and benevolent looks. That changed so suddenly I can remember the day I saw motherhood mutate from reverence to resentment.

It was August 1963. I had dismissed the doomsday warnings in the press that overpopulation was going to cause starvation and famine. As I walked down a grassy slope holding my littlest child's hand, an irate voice behind me shouted, "Don't you know how to prevent that?" I turned and knew those glaring eyes and spiteful words were meant for me. I should have "prevented" one, or all of my four daughters. Almost overnight I started to hear censure of my reproductive behavior. Even the public body language subtly changed. Few folks smiled upon my happy little troupe any longer.

Long before the child sexual abuse pandemic caused men and women to fear speaking to or touching children, the kindly head pats were over. What had corrupted the hospitable American view of children as a joy, a blessing, in such a short time?

Yes - more screwy science and screwier scientists. After Kinsey's sex blitzkrieg and pornographer Hefner's 1953 bunny launch, the public was hit with Margaret Sanger's "overpopulation" hysteria in 1957. By 1961 the fear of childbirth was so real that the National Council of Churches publicly endorsed birth control to avoid "illegitimacy" and "overpopulation."

By the mid 1960s, the prediction that babies meant world starvation was blighting the bliss of stoned sexual freedom breeders who were making much love, not war. Here was a natural activist cadre to battle for a cause, abortion on demand.

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich galvanized such activists in a December 1967 interview when he forecast world famine between 1970 and 1985 caused by babies. In his 1968 best-selling book, "Zero Population Growth," he predicted that each year in 1970 "a minimum of 10 million people will starve to death." Moreover, by "1984 the United States will quite literally be dying of thirst."

Is it any wonder that families are told today to have no more children than they can afford, and every year it gets harder to afford to have any?

Related link: Bad science vs. beautiful babies ~ Judith Reisman