This essay explores how current representations of sex, work and motherhood, in select recent films and women's science fiction, manifest and give meaning to contradictory discourses about women. Discourse analysis shows that what at first appear to be polarized discourses may be part of a larger societal need to control female sexuality, and reposition the nuclear family with woman safely within it. Ideological textual analysis may help feminists gauge how far their own discourses about abortion, female sexual adventurousness, mothering, reproductive technologies collude with, or challenge, dominant ones in relation to sex, work and motherhood.