Sixty in-depth interviews with mothers living in a urban slum of Morocco probed resistances to practicing modern methods of fertility control and began to shed light on some of the reasons family planning programs often fail to reach illiterate target populations. Economic insecurity and the disintegration of the support networks of the traditional extended family complicate the difficult lives of young mothers in the urban slum. While such factors tend to encourage smaller families, the uncertainties and complexities of the socioeconomic structure contribute to the problems blocking access to modern methods of fertility control.