Helene Deutsch seems tempted by this opinion; she writes that when the mother has not felt the labor of childbirth, she does not profoundly recognize the child as her own at the moment she is presented with him; however, she agrees that the same feeling of emptiness and strangeness is encountered in women who have given birth and suffered; and she maintains all through her book that maternal love is a feeling, a conscious attitude, and not an instinct; that it is not necessarily linked to pregnancy; according to her, a woman can maternally love an adopted child or one her husband has had from a first marriage, and so on.