bodies change, if we put this truth front and center? Women’s bodies are miraculous, and are God’s chosen means of entering our world!
Fertility Struggles
In the first creation story, Genesis 1:26–28 reads,
Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them: male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
Procreation is necessary to a creation story, to explain how there got to be so many people from presumably two. God says, “Be fruitful and multiply,” and it sounds like a command for human beings to act upon. Yet God does not say, “. . . if I decide to bless you with fertility.” Our creation stories tell us who we are, establishing our identity in relation to the rest of creation and to God. There is nothing in there implying “procreation is the major indication of the quality of relationship between God and humankind” or “disregard caring for creation as long as you make babies.” In fact, “being fruitful” and “multiplying” are two different verbs, so in addition to making human beings, having lives that produce good fruit in the world carries just as much weight as the other verb. In any case, even if one is determined to take this creation story as historical, there is still no mention that God is going to be involved in conception or the lack thereof. Eve offers an interpretation with the naming of her first child, since the word for “produced” in Hebrew is similar to “Cain”: “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord” (Gen. 4:1b).
Language about God opening wombs or granting pregnancy becomes a convention in scriptural stories (Rachel, Hannah, Mary), making a case that God has a hand in the trajectory of our lives. Sarah laughed when she heard she would birth a child. It is not written that she begged or bargained with God for a child, but God promised and then gave. The idea of praying hard enough to overcome fertility struggles may come from what we remember of Hannah’s story. In 1 Samuel, chapters 1 & 2, Hannah is one of Elkanah’s two wives, and is constantly taunted by the other, rival wife. Hannah wept because of how she was taunted, and picked fights with her husband, who thought he alone should be more than enough to make her happy. Then she made a vow to the Lord that if she would conceive a child, she would give him to the Lord’s service. Hannah made an adoption plan, even before Samuel was conceived. This is a key story to show how God cleanses the priesthood that had become corrupt. What if Hannah’s story is not about fertility but about adoption? If anything, Hannah teaches us how children are not “ours” in the first place.
I am convinced that fertility is not actually the point in many of these stories, nor are they preaching some kind of fertility gospel of pleasing God to get pregnant. The detail that “God opened her womb” seems to be included in some stories so the next thing could happen, but not necessarily to say that previously God was actively closing a woman’s womb. I have heard from individuals who are not able to conceive that perhaps God does not want them to be parents, and I fear that a misunderstanding of these plot points in the Bible might be at fault. Yet we do not blame other situations that cause us grief on God, do we? For example, does anyone claim that God does not want them to be employed, so is keeping them from finding employment? Does God keep some of our blood pressure too high, give some rheumatoid arthritis or others early onset Alzheimer’s? Wouldn’t we be ashamed to blame any of those things on God? So why, then, does infertility or conception get pinned on God?
One day when our older child was four, my body stretched and contracted, until, with blood vessels popping all over my face, I pushed our second child out into the world. The few times Scripture expresses a metaphor of birthing (most often in the prophetic book of Isaiah), the pain, effort, and power of a mother comes through. What I want to remember that God must know too, is that a mother should never have to muster that strength alone. She needs a partner, a midwife, her own mother, perhaps even a doctor trained in C-sections to help her find the strength to push her child out or to take over and get her child out. We need each other to birth new life. That, for me, was literally and metaphorically true. My maternity nurse Rose and my husband coached me through to the other side, past the utter absence of color that I saw behind my eyelids every time I clamped them shut to push, into living color once again. Knowing that my mother was at home caring for our older daughter, I entrusted myself to Rose’s knowledge and experience and to my husband’s firm grip. They stood by me and bolstered me through this most miraculous of actions. For women who must give birth via cesarean section, the help of others is the only way both mother and child survive.
Did the Holy Spirit get to midwife for Mary? Surely God did not instigate conception, then leave the birth to Mary alone. Several times in the Psalms God is described as acting like a midwife:
Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.
Psalm 22:9–10
Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you.
Psalm 71:6
Would God not also be comforting and encouraging, pushing even (as the Holy Spirit often does), until mother and child are safely resting on the outside? Or perhaps the Holy Spirit is more like a postpartum doula, who helps the new mother to adjust after the birth, address the physical changes, mitigate anxiety about the new role, and navigate all the uncertainty? The Spirit of God might be manifested in the hormone oxytocin that flows through a new mother’s body with great purpose. It gets labor going in the first place. Then a newborn scrambling to breastfeed releases more oxytocin, which increases a mother’s feelings of attachment. God knows we cannot muster it on our own, especially after a traumatic birth. Breastfeeding or skin-to-skin contact get credit for stimulating the release of oxytocin, but we could also think of that hormone release as God no longer holding her breath. The wait is over, the pushing is finished, and the breath of life releases in a forceful wind. Now the mothering begins.
A birth mother’s powerful actions during labor and delivery can set a precedent for understanding the mother’s role in general. This is some of the groundwork the Old Testament prophet Isaiah lays in comparing God to a woman in labor. Lauren Winner has a remarkable chapter on this little-used metaphor for God in her book Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God. As mothers grunt, pant, or moan during labor in order to endure and manage it (although it cannot really be controlled), God too births the new creation through hard breathing and fierce labor.
We hardly ever talk about any of these things in church, but what if we did? The more vulnerable leaders are, the more our words matter. How many mothers’ lives might we connect with? How many who are not mothers might value mothers’ lives and witness in a new way? A male colleague told me how he nearly broke down while preaching on the divorce text from Matthew 19, as he talked about his own divorce and struggling with that scripture. People told him it was the best he had ever preached. Several women clergy I know have developed special worship services for those with fertility struggles, miscarriages and infant loss out of their own deep grief over such losses. If a clergy mother picks up her upset child during worship, every mother in the place knows what it is like to be so needed, and yet have to multitask for everyone’s sake. What a gift that vulnerability is to others. So, I am working on seeing my overactive tear ducts as a blessing for ministry, to let myself share more vulnerably with others.
A dear friend of mine has written about her fertility struggles in Still a Mother: Journeys through Perinatal Bereavement, participated
