A vast range of expert online resources. Over the last generation, profound changes have occurred in the relationship between sexuality and reproduction, the assumption that pregnancy leads to parenthood, and the equation of parenthood with loving parental ties. With the increased availability of safe, effective contraception, sexual relations are less likely to lead to unwanted pregnancies. When such pregnancies do occur, the accessibility of legal abortion enables parenthood to be more of a choice than an inevitability.
If a much-wanted pregnancy ends in perinatal loss, there is the recognition that a real baby has died, allowing the couple to identify themselves as bereaved parents. The dramatic advances over the past 30 years in assisted reproductive technologies ART , especially in vitro fertilization IVF and intracytoplasmic sperm injection ICSI have also served to detach sexuality from reproduction and to devise multiple gestational pathways to parenthood.
The explosion in infant abuse and neglect cases during this time period undercuts the belief that becoming a parent ensures nurturant parenting. Finally, the reduced stigmatization and greater incidence of women giving birth out of wedlock, as well as the great increase in the percentage of women joining the workforce soon after birth, has dramatically altered women's options for parenting and work.
In short, although the usual sequence of reproduction i. Although these important biosocial changes are not the primary focus of this chapter, they provide the backdrop to consideration of these components of reproduction as more discrete and less integrated than they may have been regarded in the past. In this chapter, the psychology of reproduction is examined through the lens of these constituents in order to understand how they interact and conflict.
Owing to the voluminous literatures in many of these areas, summaries with additional references for further study are used. In discussing the psychobiologic experience of pregnancy, the family and cultural dynamics that operate in becoming parents, and the development of parental ties, the contributions of psychic, interpersonal, societal, and biologic perspectives are considered and evaluated. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the repercussions of ART on the nature of parenthood for participating couples and the impact of ART on the definition of parenthood for society at large.
