27 Exploring How Women Think About and Make their Reproductive Choices: A Generational Approach 1 Diana L. Gustafson and Marilyn Porter 2 Introduction In this chapter, we will discuss the complex operation of choice and specifically how choosing to mother (or not) is reproduced in the context of family and revealed in women’s life stories. We draw on Canadian data collected as part of an international comparative study that explored the narratives of three generations of women. Their stories illustrate how dominant discourses about chastity, conception, contraception, abortion and becoming a mother are conveyed by society, including the health care system, the Church and the state – sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly – and mediated by women within the family and transmitted across generations. We intend to convey several key messages: First, women experience their reproductive lives, not as discrete medicalized events, but as part of their entire life story. Decisions about becoming a mother are an integral part of their life stories and are responses to life events as much as, or more than, medical issues that women manage. As we theorize the politics of reproduction for this chapter, we incorporate lessons learned from the women we interviewed about how reproductive decisions are integrated within the social, emotional, familial, and cultural contexts of their lives. Sometimes the links between the social, political and familial context and the choices that women made are explicit and sometimes they are implicit. Second, we understand the family both as a social and ideological institution and as a particularized social environment that operates within pre-existing and mutually constitutive medicalizing, religious, and state discourses that become materialized in women’s reproductive