Moral Motherhood

I would be lying if I claimed to be bright enough to comprehend everything embedded in the heady pages of Father Neuhaus's impressive journal, First Things (the subscription is in my husband's name for a reason). Still, from time to time I find a nugget of readable and comprehendable insight that revolutionizes my world. This month's opinion piece, Pregnancy & Moral Labor by Agnes R. Howard, provided me with one of those rare and coveted opportunities to feel smarter and more insightful than sheer objectivity would otherwise suggest.

Prompted by language in the 2004 report from the President's Council on Bioethics that calls for "an effort to express our society's profound regard for human pregnancy and pregnant women", Howard launches into a compelling and theologically rich explanation of pregnancy as a moral act and moral labor by women, which cultivates virtue and honors mothers with a unique position as co-creators with God.

In an illustration of pregnancy as community she writes:
Pregnancy is a primary community, an exhibit to onlookers, as well as to mothers of interdependence, charity, and life together. It qualifies our assumptions of autonomy, the liberal romance with individuality and self-sufficiency. None of us at the beginning is autonomous, and the continuation of the species depends on the partial sacrifice of autonomy that women make in childbearing. Learning to extend oneself on behalf of the child in utero (and observing women who provide this aid and comfort) nurtures community within and beyond the family.

In discussing pregnancy as work and virtue she continues:
Pregnancy is not just waiting but real work. Exactly what kind of work is it? Terms offered by the market are not much help: It is not evaluated like salaried tasks, and phrases like "maternity leave" construe the event as though it were vacation or hiatus from meaningful employment. We might better avail ourselves of theological categories to help make sense of women's labor in this phase of procreation: Hospitality desribes the mother as welcoming a needy guest, Self-denial honors the pains and costs of that nurture, and Stewardship observes the boundaries of her agency in respecting Providence.

Throughout the article she effectively juxtaposes this holistic view of pregnancy agaist the more prevalent societal view that pregnancy is akin to manufacture:

After thousands of years of assuming generation and the child's soul to be primarily a male accomplishment, the discovery that mothers contribute both seed and matter might have inspired fresh consideration of maternity. Instead, we have passed from the ancient description of babies as essentially man-made to considering them as basically self-made.

...Maternity is not manufacture. A woman carrying a child is not making a baby in the sense that she can control the outcome. She is working together with God in the creation of a new human life, of which, at the end, is not the author.

And on and on she goes with her superb and winsome argument about why pregnancy - not just reproduction or procreation or the raw science of fertility, but pregnancy itself- has moral connotations for the lives we live. Unfortunately, because First Things has a policy not to post the contents of its current issue until a new issue is released, Ms. Howard's article is not yet available online. This is what the intellectually elite commonly refer to as a BUMMER. I will post the link as soon as it is available.