with not giving more.”41
You are a complex and intricate masterpiece beautifully designed to continue God’s work of creation for the world. As your womb grows and you take on the work of pregnancy, you are able to see the love between you and your husband. As women, when we open ourselves up to motherhood, beginning with our very bodies, we are changed. It all begins with pregnancy and birth. Every part of the woman’s body is at the service of creating and growing new life and then bringing that life into the world.42 The profound mystery of the creation of new souls happens quite literally inside our bodies. And then our bodies are designed to bring that life into the world — to give birth.
But isn’t this just over-spiritualizing it all? As Christians, we are an incarnational people. We believe that the material world is intimately united with the spiritual. Even more, we believe that God wants to work through the material world. He is revealed through his creation, through concrete, tangible things, from the beauty of nature to the soul-stirring power of music to the encounter with his very real flesh and blood in the Eucharist. Ours is a fleshy faith. God meets us and makes us holy through our bodies. If anything, it’s over-spiritualizing to deny that God can and does want to work through our physical bodies as he intentionally created them. We’d also have to write off the entire Theology of the Body as over-spiritualizing. The work of birth testifies to deeper mysteries, allowing us to participate in the work of God, and this is a profoundly Christian idea.
We shouldn’t be scandalized that our bodies and the powerful moments of birth reveal deep truths about God — the God of the universe, who became an unborn child, who gave water the ability to wash our souls, who designed sex to be a holy and spiritually profound act that reveals and leads us to the One who designed it all in the first place. We have a God who desires to be intimately involved in our lives and who reveals himself to us in and through our bodies — and that includes birth.
The births of my three children were all vastly different, but one thing was a constant — God was there, present with me, loving me. Always. Just because my first experience was traumatic doesn’t lessen the fact that he was present. One doesn’t negate the other; in fact, it can be the opposite. He stays with us in the hard places and can carry us through to the other side if we’ll let him. And just because my last birth was peaceful and I was well cared for, that doesn’t mean that his presence wasn’t just as strongly felt. Birth can be an occasion for both joy and suffering, pain and ecstasy, love and fear. Our God is big enough for all of those things and more. By allowing him into the life-changing experience of birth, we are opening ourselves up to the true miracle of bringing life into the world.
— Christina Kolb, mom to three
Birth Fallen, Birth Redeemed
“When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world.”— John 16:21
Ah, the chapter where it gets a bit more real … or, more appropriately, where we feel it a bit more. All that nice theology talk sounds lovely and looks great on paper. But at some point we need to get to the reality of what that will actually mean for us in our bodies. Does God’s plan affect what we as women physically experience during our births?
In his Theology of the Body, Pope John Paul II based his reflections and work on Christ’s prompting to go “back to the beginning” to understand God’s design and will for us, which helps us better understand what he wants from us, and what birth can become in light of the redemption.
Was Birth Supposed to Be Painful?
In the story of creation taken from Scripture, we are led to understand that God designed and desired childbirth. The very first command given to Adam and Eve after their creation was, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gn 1:29). He wanted Adam and Eve to be intimate, to conceive, and to give birth! Sex, the physical, self-giving love between husband and wife, is good and desired by God, and it is meant to be fruitful both spiritually and physically. This means that the natural result — birth — is also good and desired by God.
As the fruit of the perfect love between a perfect man and a perfect woman, in the beginning birth did not include pain. Did it occur as naturally as other bodily functions, or was it even pleasurable or euphoric? We don’t know. We do know, however, that things changed.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they upset God’s original design for all of creation, which means God’s original design for birth also got messed up. While the first command of God still stands, it now comes with caveats. Genesis tells us: “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain [issabownek] in childbearing; in pain [be’eseb] you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (3:16).
This is not happenstance. The consequence hits at the very heart of who the woman is — bringer of life into the world. God doesn’t negate that original command to be fruitful and multiply — sexuality, marriage, and childbearing are still good and desired by God — but now the original plan becomes more difficult. The effects of sin reach deep into who we are as man and woman, both as individuals and in relationship to each other.
In all of human history, the Church traditionally holds that only one woman ever underwent childbirth without suffering the consequences of original sin: there is a long-standing tradition that Mary gave birth to Jesus without pain, because she was conceived without sin through the future merits of her Son. The Catechism of the Council of Trent states: “To Eve it was said: In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. Mary was exempt from this law, for preserving her virginal integrity inviolate she brought forth Jesus the Son of God without experiencing … any sense of pain.”43 Many Church Fathers also wrote that Mary had no pain in childbirth.
Pain in childbirth is the lingering and deeply rooted effect of sin, and we regret that consequence. But this should not lead us to despair, or to curse Eve, or to distance ourselves from Mary. Rather, it is an invitation to allow our hearts to see the tragedy of sin, and then choose to find our own unique part to play in God’s plan in light of the rest of the story.
The Importance of the Biblical Understanding of “Pain”
If we are seeking to understand God’s design for birth, then let’s try to understand what he himself says about it in Scripture. The first thing to note is the very words used in the original Hebrew texts. Translating from one language to another often loses some of the full meaning, and the connotation can change depending on the word used by the translator. The Hebrew masculine noun used for Adam’s punishment — “toil” in his work (be’issabown44) — has the same root noun, itstsabon, as the feminine noun used for Eve’s “pain” in childbirth (issabownek45): “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply your pain [issabownek] in childbirth’” (Gn 3:16). Itstsabon is defined as “pain or toil.”46 A different word, be’eseb, is used in the next line from Genesis: “In pain [be’eseb] you will bring forth children.” Both words come from the verb ‘atsab, which is simply defined as “to displease or grieve.”47
Simply put, the “pain” in childbirth can have a larger connotation than our language offers. It might give us a truer perspective of pregnancy and birth to use a fuller definition. While there are women who are graced with nearly painless births (really!), the vast majority will experience some degree of pain. But it can be tremendously helpful to change your mindset toward what labor and birth will be. Prompted by a more complete understanding of the words of Genesis, let’s take on the idea that labor is work. As Adam has his difficult work, so Eve has hers. Labor is called labor for a reason. Labor, birth, and recovery will be very, very hard work.
The preparation for and the act of birth is analogous to a marathon. There is much preparation involved, there is a lot of work to put in, and it’s not at all easy