Country music writer Tom Roland described "One's on the Way" as a "humorous piece on motherhood," wherein a housewife in Topeka, Kansas, pregnant with the latest in a family of several children, contemplates her hectic lifestyle and compares her conditions to the glamor-based lives of Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor.

[1] The song also makes reference to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House and sex symbol actress Raquel Welch again in contrast to the housewife vocalist's conventional life.

In effect, "One's on the Way" and similarly themed songs, such as "Don't Come Home A' Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" and "The Pill", helped Lynn become "the spokeswoman for every woman who had gotten married too early, pregnant too often and felt trapped by the tedium and drudgery of her life.

For instance, in the first verse, she draws comparisons between such things as Taylor flying to France to have her hair done and the joy and gaiety of the social scene in Washington and her own dull life: At one point, she angers her husband after a misunderstanding (he had called from a nearby tavern to announce he was bringing some old Army friends home, just as she was trying to shoo one of her children away from somewhere he wasn't supposed to be).

At some points in the lyrics the singer mentions the (then new) birth control pill and women's liberation movement, seeming to lament that such changes will soon affect the rest of the country, but may never have a real influence on her life.