A History of Pregnancy in Christianity

From Original Sin to Contemporary Abortion Debates

Anne Stensvold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780415857581
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135106546
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book examines changing views of procreation and fetal development throughout the history of the Christian tradition. This is the first comprehensive study of cultural perceptions of pregnancy, an area of scholarship that been understudied in the past. Pregnancy holds a central place in Christian ritual, iconography, and theology, including the dogma of the incarnation and the cult of Virgin Mary. This book provides a broad introduction to the attitudes and ideas within Western Christian communities by focusing on four periods of transition: Antiquity, the Enlightenment, modernity, and the present day. It lays the groundwork for further study of the interactions between biological models, cultural preconceptions, and religious beliefs.

Part I Beginnings

Theory, late antiquity (200–500), and the medieval period (500–1500)¹

1 Conceptualizing Pregnancy

DOI: 10.4324/9780203798898-2

Figure 1.1American film actress Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, August 1991. © Annie Leibovitz.

In 1991, Demi Moore made history when she appeared naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. The picture was hard to decipher; an expectant mother or a sexualized body? Mary or Eve? It defied such distinctions and stated boldly that this woman was both: mother and sex symbol. The picture created havoc, but the posture soon became a standard for pregnant Hollywood celebrities – and others. Ambiguity was probably the reason for its success. When Demi Moore fixes the spectator with her gaze, she challenges them to acknowledge her body as her own. This is her belly, and the foetus inside it is hers.¹

In 1991, when the image was first published, American society was marked by heated debates on abortion. The pregnant Demi Moore must be seen in this context. Whether intentional or not, the image was an intervention in the abortion debates. Playing on Mary and Eve as cultural stereotypes, it was also a critique of traditional Christianity. Here was a celebrated film star and a successful professional woman who displayed her naked body in public. This was a new kind of feminist statement: A woman playing on cultural stereotypes willingly presenting herself as an object of desire. The cover image was ambiguous, to say the least.

In anthropology, ambiguity is associated with taboo and uncleanliness (Turner 1967, Douglas 1966). The typical reaction is to keep it apart and hide it away. In Western society today, it seems that the reverse is true. Mass media are permeated by ambiguous bodies which break with established oppositions – private vs. public, pretty vs. ugly, man vs. woman – thereby keeping ancient dualisms alive. Demi Moore played on these categorizations when she displayed her pregnant body in public. Unlike images of androgynous fashion models, her pregnant body is ambiguous because it contains more than one human being. This blurring of bodies makes the pregnant body a disturbing entity; it doesn’t fit. This is particularly evident in the way that mass media normally present pregnant women: either as expecting housewife-mothers “who cannot wait to meet their child” or as busy career women with “a baby bump” who go jogging as usual. Mother Mary and sinful Eve have been recast as mother and career woman: both share a common fate in having a female body.

Ambiguity also dictates the way we speak about the foetus. It is hard to talk about because it surpasses the distinction that we normally rely on: It is not a human being, and nor is it not human. The uncertainty is reflected in ordinary speech. If the pregnancy is desired, we speak about the foetus as if it were already a full-born child – thereby magically helping to bring it safely into the world. But if the pregnancy is unwanted, we use words which allow us to think of the foetus as something external, invading, and foreign – something which can be removed. Both options rely on a false assumption that we can speak with certainty about something which remains unclear. A foetus is in the process of becoming a human being – or not. It is hard to talk about because it is hidden and unreachable beyond normal human relationships: Except for its mother, it remains unknown to others until it is born. The introduction of ultrasound images from the mid-1980s changed all this; as Clare Hanson puts it: “The ultrasound has become widely accepted as a crucial rite de passage in pregnancy, the point at which the embryo becomes (at 11 to 13 weeks) a ‘real baby’” (Hanson 2004: 158). The ultrasound image served as proof, as it were, of the foetus’ existence. Nevertheless, the reality of the foetus still remains inaccessible in principle because its existence can only be observed indirectly via the mother’s expanding belly. Hence, pregnancy remains a complex cultural phenomenon, and the life of the foetus remains surrounded by uncertainty. Although the process of foetal development is well known by now and scientific documentation is available to everyone, each individual pregnancy is unique. Or put differently: The beginning of life is as difficult to monitor as the end.

Over the last decades, pregnancy has increasingly become a matter of medical expertise and manipulation – from IVF to surrogacy. But apart from these inventions, pregnancy has also remained a function of the female body. Whether a pregnancy ends with the birth of a healthy child or by spontaneous abortion – and whether a pregnancy is wanted or not – it is an experience of existential dimensions, leaving its marks on the female body as a remembrance. Therefore, it is rather surprising that pregnancy has played such a small part in feminist theory. Feminist theory has been closely attached to the political project of female liberation from the start, and feminist theory has therefore had strong normative trends and has to a large extent been judged just as much by its political merits as by its academic achievements. In short, the socio-political situation of women has been its focus, and social oppression, rather than biology, has been its main concern. This is also the case in religious studies, where feminist scholars have typically focused on women’s religious practices and on the conceptualization of womanhood in sacred texts (King 1995, Juschka 2001). Among Christian feminists, the picture is slightly different, since intellectual achievement is often combined with activism and motivated by a wish for internal church reform. Liturgical studies of gender-inclusive language and historical research on the first Christian communities are examples of feminist research areas motivated by a wish to change (male-dominated) normative Christianity. Taking the patriarchal tradition of the Catholic Church into account, it is no surprise that Catholic feminists are at the forefront of feminist theology (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983, Ruether 1983, Børresen 1968 and 1995). Criticizing the theological basis for the Church’s overt denial of women’s equality to men, they have been less concerned about theoretical debates about gender.²

Toril Moi suggests (Moi 1998) that the leading French feminist Simone de Beauvoir had a liberating mission when she coined the cultural-constructivist concept of gender (“On ne naît pas femme on le devient” – “You are not born a woman, you become one”). By introducing the idea of sexual roles as culturally construed rather than biological facts, Beauvoir gave the subordination of women a less compelling character. It is perhaps significant that Beauvoir herself did not experience motherhood. Nevertheless, the idea of pregnancy – the possibility of it – conditions the self-understanding of women from the first menstruation onwards. Whether or not pregnancy is actually experienced, it is a fact of women’s lives – a possibility – from the age of puberty to menopause. Regardless of whether it is something you hope for or wish to avoid – something you expect to happen or a distant memory – pregnancy shapes women’s lives.

Although pregnancy and birth are foundational events and the birth of the Saviour is a central theme in the Christian calendar and cultural representation, pregnancy does not receive much attention. It has a surprisingly small place in art; whereas portraits of the Virgin and Child abound, depictions of Mary as an expectant mother are extremely rare. Birth is also conspicuously absent in Western fiction and mostly described from a male perspective, as in scenes in which the father listens to the cries of pain, scenes describing how women suffer, and scenes explaining the fear associated with a dramatic delivery. “I need to address my gratitude to someone or something”, my friend said when she wanted to explain why she, a non-religious person, wanted to have her newborn child baptized in church. Such perspectives are conspicuously absent from Christian art. The Internet revolution has hardly had any impact in this regard. The quantity of information on pregnancy and birth has grown exponentially, but not more so than other topics of a personal nature. On social media sites such as Facebook, the number of pages dedicated to pregnancy is overwhelming, but the presentations are strikingly poor and are nothing other than repetitive displays of cultural clichés. At the same time, the messages are surprisingly private in character. It is “my pregnant body” and “my birth experience”. This privatization of pregnancy and birth may be explained as a result of the long history of male dominance and female invisibility in public. But it is also possible to say that the poverty of expression and the lack of words reflect the wordless quality of the interaction between the woman and her unborn offspring. It is also strangely emblematic of the fragility of that relationship.

Because of this cultural silence, we lack words and metaphors which would allow us to reflect and develop our understanding of pregnancy. This has far-reaching consequences, not least for the political debates about abortion, where the lack of an adequate vocabulary is striking. The feminist Julia Kristeva is an exception (Kristeva 1986). In an article written during her own pregnancy, she tries to capture the experience, and she describes it as a deeply disturbing and ambivalent one. Her intervention comes as a response to the feminist emancipatory project. Starting with Simone de Beauvoir who wrote about pregnancy in negative terms (Beauvoir 1989), feminist academics have largely treated pregnancy and motherhood as a political challenge rather than as a bodily experience and an emotional relationship. But whereas Beauvoir was critical because her project was female emancipation, Kristeva tries to capture the significance of the mother–child relation. Interestingly, when she writes about pregnancy, she uses much the same imagery as Beauvoir used when writing about the sexual relationship between man and woman.

To Beauvoir, motherhood was the main obstacle to female emancipation. Her ideal was the male artist – the only truly free person in the Paris of her day. She protested against a patriarchal society which forced women into passivity and idealized motherhood, and put up a male ideal for women to aspire to. To Beauvoir, freedom was paramount and motherhood was its negation. While men were free to make an imprint on the world, women were victims of their biology. They were locked up in the home, where they led restricted lives robbed of their freedom and independence. Women lived in a perpetual state of annihilation, a condition epitomized by pregnancy. She claimed: “With her ego surrendered, alienated in her body and in her social dignity, the mother enjoys the comforting illusion of feeling that she is a human being in herself, a value. But this is only an illusion. For she does not really make the baby, it makes itself within her” (Beauvoir 1989: 496). A thoroughly political feminist, Simone de Beauvoir embraced gender equality and sexual emancipation, but regarded pregnancy as an abomination because of the social implications it entailed for women. To her, sexuality was a more interesting topic because it signified transgression and therefore liberation. She described sexual intercourse as a truly transgressive act: “There is in erotic love a tearing away from the self; transport, ecstasy; suffering also tears through the limits of the ego, it is transcendence, a paroxysm” (Beauvoir 1989: 390). To men, it involves transcending the limits of their own body, whereas women desire the dissolution of the distinction between you and me, subject and object. In Beauvoir’s analysis, the male sexual act is related to men’s propensity for action – and creativity.

When Beauvoir denounced women’s aspirations to marriage and motherhood, it was because she was a political writer addressing the oppression of women in French society in the postwar period. She regarded motherhood as a form of self-denial, using the concept of suffusion, of total identification with the foetus, to illustrate her point. In pregnancy, the suppressed housewife–woman has the illusion of owning her own body, as the child takes over from the husband (Beauvoir 1989: 496). Here, Beauvoir describes motherhood as a distorted kind of sexual desire – the woman’s longing to melt in the man’s embrace is subsumed under her wish to remain as one with her child. Pregnancy and motherhood become synonymous with alienation (Beauvoir 1989: 477). This was also what marriage implied for women, namely, the surrender of their subjectivity. To become a wife and mother was what Beauvoir’s audience (1940s French women) aspired to. Like many defenders of conservative family values, Beauvoir saw pregnancy as a symbol of marriage and – unlike the former – therefore as a symbol of repression. With her critique of marriage in mind, the pregnant body was a symbolic prison that entailed a life in slavery to biological functions rather than a celebration of the freedom she valued.

Although Beauvoir’s scepticism towards pregnancy was somewhat exaggerated – she described it as a female self-sacrifice – it does underscore the fact that pregnancy implies a fundamental change for the female body. When the female body hosts another human being, and when its belly starts to swell, it takes on a life of its own, so to speak: It loses its subjectivity and gains an additional meaning. It is a pregnant body and therefore not exclusively ‘mine’. This blurring of distinctions between mother and child is also the focus of Julia Kristeva’s reflections on pregnancy and birth as she strove to come to grips with the experience. Writing about the foetus in her womb, Kristeva contradicts Beauvoir when she describes her attitude as being deeply ambiguous and expresses estrangement and wonder:

The other (the child) is inevitable, she seems to say, turn it into a God if you wish, it is nevertheless natural, for such an other has come out of myself, which is yet not myself but a flow of unending germinations, an eternal cosmos. The other goes much without saying and without my saying that, at the limit, it does not exist for itself.

(Kristeva 1986: 168)

What Kristeva describes is not suffusion, but rather the contrary: distant adoration and incessant but failed attempts to grasp the reality of the unborn child. With a clear reference to Beauvoir (“turn it into a God if you wish”), she dismisses her exposition of motherhood as irrelevant. The pregnant female body does not fit into a strictly dualistic system of either/or, man or child, but remains a residual category – a personal experience and a social fact at one and the same time. It is a mute phenomenon veiled in mystery and therefore not expressed in language. In order to break this silence, Kristeva brings forth the only culturally acceptable or speakable pregnant woman, the Virgin Mary. The title of Kristeva’s essay is “Stabat Mater”, a title which evokes religious as well as aesthetic associations to the Virgin’s suffering at the feet of the Cross and the music and paintings dedicated to this theme of pain and beauty in Christian art. Writing about the period shortly after delivery, Kristeva describes giving birth as a physical separation. It is not the woman who attaches herself (desperately) to the child as Beauvoir maintained. The woman’s relation to her child is blurred, chaotic, and urgent – so much so that we are uncertain of who she refers to when writing “my body”: Is it the foetus, the newborn, or her own body? We do not know:

My body is no longer mine, it doubles up, suffers, bleeds, catches cold, puts its teeth in, slobbers, coughs, is covered with pimples, and it laughs. And yet, when its joy, my child’s, returns, its smile washes only my eyes. But the pain, its pain – it comes from inside, never remains apart, other, it inflames me at once.

(Kristeva 1986: 167)

Kristeva’s poetic rendering of the experience of pregnancy and motherhood is one of surprisingly few. It would seem that the entry of a large number of women into the blogosphere would mean that women’s experiences and women’s points of view would have gained an unprecedented focus. But so far, the Internet revolution has only increased the cultural exposition of women’s bodies as passive objects in advertising, fashion, and film.

It is possible to go beyond criticism of misogynistic Western culture and approach the cultural absence of pregnancy from a different angle. Inspired by structuralist anthropology, we could describe the pregnant body as disturbing. It is disturbing because it deviates from the normal body, which by definition belongs to one person. The pregnant body defies this; it is different, out of the ordinary, ambiguous, and therefore culturally embarrassing and often ignored. An important argument in structuralist anthropology (Lévi-Strauss 1963, Douglas 1966, Ortner 1973) is the claim that cultures cannot withstand ambiguity and will typically try to place ambiguous phenomena into a binary structure or else exclude them by making them sacred or taboo. Writing about primitive (oral) culture, Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that every culture has a classificatory system based on opposites (left/right, cold/hot, dark/light). This dualism conditions our thought and inspires myths, i.e. stories that explain cultural categories. Myths are stories we tell in order to make sense of our lives, and the driving force behind them is the dualism of culture and language, which “always progresses from the awareness of oppositions towards their resolution” (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 224). If transposed to more familiar terrain, we can easily find confirmation of this in Christian theology, where those articles of faith that do not easily fit into the system attract more attention. Take, for instance, the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which states the logical impossibility that Christ was both a man and God. The bishops’ council at Nicaea (325) first tackled the problem by declaring the dogma of Jesus’ double nature: true God and true man. They seemingly created a synthesis, but in fact only established a contradiction to be a truth. Since the dogma did not in fact resolve the contradiction, it continues to be food for t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Beginnings: Theory, late antiquity (200–500), and the medieval period (500–1500)
• PART II The Enlightenment: From the Reformation to modernity (1400–1700)
• PART III Modernity: 1800–1900
• PART IV Contemporary debates: The twentieth century to the present
• Afterthoughts
• Bibliography
• Index