In the U.S., experts and cultural producers frequently speak for and about sex workers, while sex work itself is consistently maligned and misunderstood. In this context, representations of sex worker mothers that offer an opportunity to gain perspective on their lives through their eyes have value. We conducted an ideological analysis of U.S. mainstream media representations of sex worker mothers between 2017–2020, a time of corporate and public policy change. We argue that the mothers are represented as articulating scripts that move with and against cultural ideologies for motherhood by (1) speaking to the ideology of stigma and the protection of their children; (2) engaging the ideology of motherhood as a consumerist practice as an implicit logic to justify their demonised work; and (3) rendering visible the invisible labour of sex working mothers, unsettling the normative ideology of what counts as work.