Can Feminist Christians Hasten the Advent of Reproductive Liberation? by Elizabeth M. Freese, PhD

The collision of the 2023 Christian liturgical season of Advent with American reproductive politics has been jarring. Feminist religious critique and transformative activism are imperative.

With the Texas Supreme Court decision on a dire abortion case, alongside increasing criminalization of women having miscarriages, we are witnessing the principle of patriarchal dominance of female reproductive capacity and the denigration of women’s full, equal personhood pushed to the extreme. In part, this barbarity is perpetuated by Christianity. Even though this tradition often challenges social systems of injustice, and it does not actually support their hollow theology of “life at conception,” misogynist oppressors have plenty of Christian religiosity to stand on.

Advent is ostensibly a time of great anticipation for a new era of love, justice, and freedom from oppression. Yet, aspects of the season’s liturgies legitimate reproductive in-justice by constructing an underlying moral rhetoric that exalts female procreation under male control and demonizes female refusal of procreation.

I’ll begin with the straight, sacralized reading of the traditional story of the Annunciation, in which God the Father’s angel tells Mary of her reproductive future, including how God’s Spirit will “overshadow” her and make her pregnant. Whether Mary’s assent mattered, after the announcement, is debatable.  Paraphrasing Mary Daly, the story gives off what amount to “rapey vibes.” Interpretation can help – elevating Mary’s reproductive agency and calling out theologies that deny her right to bodily consent – as my colleague Rev. Angela Tyler-Williams did well in this recent sermon. The next step, though, should be to build new power dynamics and Mary’s clear agency into the telling of the story in the first place.

At a deeper level of Advent liturgy – and framing Mary’s story – there is a more pernicious problem, which I recognized during a “Lessons and Carols” service. Two narratives of women were juxtaposed:

1. the story in Genesis 3:1-15 of the serpent speaking to Eve about becoming wise and eating the fruit from the forbidden tree, which prompted her to decide to eat the fruit, which made her wise, but which displeased God
   
2. the story (as above) in Luke 1:1-56 of the angel telling “favored” Mary about God’s plan to conscript her reproductive labor, to which she replied, “I am the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (1:38)

Why is Gen. 3 included in this liturgy? Notably, the lectionary reading only recounts Eve’s rebellious action, not her eventual procreation. As I elaborate below, I contend that her rebellion was specifically a “bad” reproductive action, relative to the “good” reproductive action of Mary, which is the point of the juxtaposition.

The Eve/Mary opposition is foreshadowed in Isaiah 64:1-9 on the first Sunday of Advent. Here, Israel has “sinned” and is metaphorically cast as an “unclean” person whose “deeds are like a filthy cloth” (64:5-6). In clearer translations, the deeds are actually “like a menstrual rag.” And elsewhere in Isaiah (30:22), sinful Israel is metaphorically equated with an “unclean” menstruating woman, who must become clean and cast off the “menstrual rag” to be in right relation with God. 

Indeed, Isaiah 64 overall is about Israel’s desire for God to bring new pro/creation to a desolate (barren), repentant, submissive Zion, who Isaiah frequently portrays as a woman or wife to Yahweh. Faith in this vision is strong: “O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand… Now consider, we are all your people” (64:8-9). In other words, God, “the Father,” can redeem Israel with his male power in the same way he can redeem a woman by moving her from a problematic, anti-reproductive state of being to a positive, reproductive one, when she submits to his will.

Addressing this Isaiah passage during Advent, one scholar remarked, “For Christians, the prophet’s prayer receives an answer in the incarnation… [In the gospels] a woman’s body and reproductive processes were not a source of shame, but active agents in God’s plan for forgiveness, healing, and salvation.” Mary’s active procreative capacity was essential to the incarnation of Jesus, and the more respect for that truth, the more Christians may respect reproductive labor. But what about women’s reproductive capacity to refuse or halt procreation?

We are to intuit the answer from the veiled symbolism in Gen 3:1-15. The serpent is indicative of goddesses, reproduction, and life/death duality.[i] And the fruit that Eve ate may have been a pomegranate,[ii] which was one of several methods of ancient birth control, and possibly abortion, used in the Near East, Mediterranean, and North Africa around the times that the Genesis stories were written.[iii] (Modern studies on the fertility-inhibiting properties of various plants referenced in ancient texts support this contention.[iv]) The symbolism is crystalized in images of an earth goddess – likely a hybrid of both Demeter and Persephone – holding grain and pomegranate in each of her hands, respectively symbolizing fertility and sterility,[v] and, perhaps, their cyclicity and/or necessary balance.

Further, in some ancient societies around the Mediterranean, there may have been female-centric, goddess worshipping rituals at first menarche, in which girls would have gone through an induction into the dual powers of life and death and were perhaps educated about their cycles and even birth control.[vi] In one example, there is evidence that a multi-day women’s ritual in the ancient cult of Demeter may have included pomegranate seeds and exactly this type of cultural transmission.[vii] Female bodily wisdom and women’s autonomous sense of reproductive and anti-reproductive power would threaten any intensively pronatalist patriarchal agenda, and God the Father’s response to Eve’s action was to subjugate her to patriarchy and command her to prolifically procreate. Thus, it is reasonable to interpret her “sin” as specifically one of reproductive defiance.

In some traditional lectionary readings in Advent liturgies, then, a reproductively “bad” woman is converted into a reproductively “good” woman. This metaphor undergirds the spirituality of the season. Inadvertent as it may be, Christians are repeatedly strengthening this moral logic of female reproductive capacities, which legitimates patriarchal domination of women. May Christian lovers of justice repent of this sin and transform their religious praxis to revere women’s reproductive wisdom and hasten an advent of reproductive liberation and justice.

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[i] K.R. Jones (1975) “The Serpent in Genesis 3.” Journal of Old Testament Scholarship 87:1, p. 2-9; and E. A. Phillips (2000) “Serpent Intertexts: Tantalizing Twists in the Tales.” Bulletin for Biblical Research 10:2, p. 238.

[ii] C. Myers (2012) Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 61. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199734559.001.0001

[iii] J. Riddle (1997) Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 40-45.

[iv] Riddle, Chapter 2 “The Herbs Know to the Ancients.”

[v] Ibid. p. 41

[vi] M. Rigoglioso (2005) “Persephone’s Lake and the Ancient Female Mystery Religion in the Womb of Sicily” in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21:2, p. 11, 16-17, 26.

[vii] Riddle, p. 58.

BIO: Elizabeth M. Freese, PhD is a scholar-activist and educator. She is currently serving as Scholar-in-Residence to develop curricula with SACReD (Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity), an alliance of religious leaders, congregations, movement organizations, activists, and academics collaborating to advance Reproductive Justice through congregational education, culture change, community building, and direct service. Freese earned her doctorate in sociology of religion from Drew University Graduate Division of Religion and teaches courses at Drew Theological School on Religion and Society.