Child-bearing is not an equal opportunity activity. The pain and the suffering are all a woman’s to bear. Yet even knowing this, even having observed it, women continue to go down unto death in order to bring forth new life, a continuing of generations. Some primeval force propels almost all females into this enterprise.
In the mid-1970s, I organized consciousness-raising type groups with Catholic women—ranging from Mexican-Americans in Texas, to black Catholics in Washington, D.C., and a wide range of urban and suburban white Catholic women. None of these groups included professed religious. The common denominator across race, across social class and economic status lines turned out to be motherhood. We had all come by the same natural process to conception. I was more bonded with these women than I had ever anticipated.
Last fall my own daughter gave birth to her firstborn. When I knew her hour had come, I found myself pacing the floor at home until I heard the good news. Flesh of my own flesh underwent the travail of giving new life, and I walked with her as far as I could.
Anne Eggebroten, writing in The Other Side, speaks of the memory of childbirth reminding us of each person’s value: “Someone suffered to bring you into this world, and Jesus suffered to bring you to heaven. In a world of hunger, torture, disease, and war we need to remember the immense cost of incarnation—of acquiring bodies. Each mother pays this cost for her child. Mary paid it for Jesus. And Jesus paid it for us all.”
What happens to all of us when large numbers of talented women, under the influence of radical feminist thought, deny the priorities that keep human life going and try to be like men? To what gain, for anyone? Women go into the marketplace and are co-opted by men. A feminine lifestyle is still considered lesser. Taking care of children, attending to personal relationships, interferes with productivity, we hear.
The work that women do is always the lowest paid no matter what the profession. It begins early. The girl who babysits is paid less than the boy who mows the lawn. Woman’s work starts low and stays low. Where intelligent, resourceful mothers once considered time well spent in teaching and encouraging their own children, now all that matters is paid work. A woman must hurry back to the marketplace, leaving the baby to a more impersonal caretaker, one less likely to be enthralled with the milestones of development.
What is at stake here is the protection of a mother’s right to mother her own child, to have the time to develop a bond of trust between mother and child that will influence all other relationships.
In the past few months we have been under media assault by “pro-choice” forces. In an era when motherhood is so conspicuously a matter of choice, the choice to suffer, to sacrifice in order to bring forth new life should receive even more reinforcement than before from the community. Instead, the difficulties increase. A child is seen as a self-indulgence, as perhaps the ultimate toy after all the other toys are purchased.
A child is seen as a private choice and the community at large does not seem to see an obligation to provide maternal health care or protection of infant health. “It’s the woman’s problem. She made her bed, let her lie in it.” It is certainly easier to find help in preventing or terminating pregnancy than to find help to deliver and to take care of the baby afterward. It’s the woman’s own problem.
One of my daughters-in-law warned my daughter not to get too quickly into paying for a mortgage—”or you will never have the children you want—you will always be paying the mortgage.”
The idea of the “common good” is a Catholic belief which conflicts with the heightened individualism of our contemporary society. Within the space of less than a century, we have eroded extended kin networks, undermined the nuclear family, and left everyone on his or her own. The least among us, vulnerable children, can’t really manage alone. Women and children first? Not in the 1990s. Women with children are last.
Maybe we should do more reflecting on the created order. No woman ever became pregnant by herself. “Male and female he created them” and the two together are the image of God. They imitate God with their power of creating life, and just as in this description from Genesis, it takes both sexes.
Up until the 1950s the man saw the role of provider as a major masculine role. This began to erode in the wake of feminism and the sexual revolution. Am I the only person left alive who remembers a father’s sacrifices to keep food on the table? His work kept him away from home much of the time, but his honesty and integrity left lasting imprints on my siblings and me. Whole neighborhoods without fathers may never have seen anyone go to work. What does that mean for the children growing up in such an environment?
Married women are told to stay employed on the rationale that they might get divorced someday and should be able to provide for themselves. Unnoticed is how this diminishes a man’s sense of responsibility to his family. If the man disappears and a woman cannot provide for her children, the state may have to fill in for the missing father. She may even lose her children because she cannot provide for them.
Whereas a generation ago, early marriage meant fewer unwed births, there are fewer marriages and the number of unwed births has increased proportionately. “The woman can take care of herself.” Why should a man assume responsibility for someone who “got herself pregnant”?
When I was seven years old, my mother explained to me the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. So awesome was this information that I can still remember where she sat and where I sat as she drew pictures of the reproductive organs for me. The information was like armor, a protection in adolescent relationships. Now I am 58 years old, and I read articles written by clerics who say “we should get away from the emphasis on procreative sexuality.” With universal sterilization?
My own upbringing was Methodist, but I have lived under the umbrella of Holy Mother Church all of my adult life. Growing up in the most egalitarian of mainline Protestant denominations, I never heard that being Christian was any different for men than for women.
For all the current Catholic complaints, I cannot help but note that more women than men remain faithful to the Church. The parish church has often provided a place for a wife and mother to exercise leadership and yet still remain close to home and family and the values that are important to her.
One of my favorite feminine passages in Scripture is the marriage feast of Cana. I grew up understanding this as one of the first signs of Jesus’s approval of the way women operate. At first Jesus put Mary off, but then He does as she asks. How like any mother and son. I have heard at least one Catholic feminist theologian call this passage a put- down of women. Do any Catholic feminists have sons? I have four and I know that a “no” or “don’t bother me now” is likely to become “yes” eventually.
Although I have focused so far on the mother with child, I know that women do not spend all their lives childbearing. Most American women will live many years beyond the birth of the last child. Women can and do enter the marketplace at various ages. But an unfortunate stigma remains for having taken time out for perpetuating human life.
The cooperative enterprise that brings life into being in the first place will continue, in and out of wedlock. A contemporary couple may lead a cooperative lifestyle with egalitarian role-sharing. Today’s husband is less likely to feel uncomfortable carrying babies around, changing diapers, and feeding babies, al-though this seems more likely to be the case for the well-educated middle class than for the working class. Such cooperative attitudes should also extend into the public domain, not necessarily as a team, but so that both men and women can be a part of the active life of the community.
How does a mother pray? Always and everywhere, without ceasing, for one’s own and all the other valuable ones who may have no one to attend to them. In the middle of the night when a child has not yet returned. Especially at Mass for those who seem to be straying. Good days and bad days.
A mother holds the child in the palm of her hand just as a young father I know held his prematurely-born son in the palm of his hand. My own mother believed a mother must hold fast with an open hand. The open palm is a resting place, a place of security, but it is also a launching pad so the child can take flight when she is ready to be on her own, but is still in place if she needs to return.
The Catholic Church nourishes the faithful, and the not so faithful, with symbols that are clearly maternal. Does Holy Mother Church ever really let anyone go and be forgotten? It is as unlikely as our own mother forgetting us. The Church nourishes us, too, with real food, not just words. There were only the words in my previous spiritual home, and much as I cherished them, they were not enough.
The words and the food transcend the fragility of the persons that convey them to us. So, too, do our own mothers become more than they really are as they are carried by the momentum of their own bodies to bring us into existence and then to keep us in existence.
It is not accidental that Mary is the image of all that is good and holy. The Gospel images of Mary are those of the perfect caretaker. At the foot of the cross, she was told to extend her concern to all. She is therefore a model for the service and wisdom that a woman beyond childbearing can offer to the community.
I came to faith at my mother’s knee, where from early childhood on I heard the story of her prayers on my behalf. The answer to prayer was so abundant that three other children were born. I am my mother’s fifth attempt to bring a live baby into this world. I am the child her doctor said could never be born.