Hope Is Giving Birth in the Face of the Dragon

The image of the baby born under the rubble of the recent earthquake in Syria has been haunting me. So has the image in my mind of her mother, giving birth to her baby while trapped after the building, where she, her husband, and their children were sleeping, collapsed.  The baby’s uncle, who was digging through the debris hoping to reach his brother and family, found the baby alive, her umbilical cord still attached to her mother. He cut the cord and the baby let out a cry.  Tragically, her mother had died after giving birth, as had her father and siblings.

I keep thinking of her mother – of what it must have been like for her to go into labor while being pinned under the rubble of the collapsed building, with not so much as a hand to hold let alone a midwife, medical facilities, pain relief, clean sheets, hot water, and simply the ability to move.  Had she even been able to see or touch her baby before she died?  What were her fears?  What were her hopes? 

In a session on hope during my training to be a hospice volunteer, we went around the circle and each gave our definition of hope.  One person said, “Hope is giving birth in the face of the dragon.”  The reference is to the book of Revelations in the Bible, where it is written of Mary that a  “ . . . dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.”[i] Despite the threatening circumstances of Jesus’s birth and life, Mary gives birth in the face of the dragon.  I found this reference later in Audre Lorde’s “Man Child,” where she writes of the perilous nature of giving birth and “raising Black children – female and male – in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon.”[ii]  

The dragons abound.  Undoubtedly, the Syrian woman who gave birth in the midst of an earthquake had already given birth to her other children in the face of the dragon of war, as have women living in underground shelters in Ukraine.  Women in Afghanistan and Iran give birth to girls in the face of the dragon of severe gender oppression, while those in Somalia give birth in the face of famine and death. Others, seeking refuge and asylum, birth children while fleeing violence and poverty. African American women in the U.S. give birth facing the dragon of their children being  at high risk of incarceration and gun violence;[iii] as do indigenous women in the U.S. whose girl children are at such high risk of disappearing and being murdered, and whose boy children are at high risk of death by suicide;[iv] as do women in prison, often shackled while giving birth, whose babies are taken from them soon after being born;[v] as do women all over the world whose children face an uncertain future of climate crisis and possible catastrophe.

Every birthing mother faces her own dragon as well, for what Margaret Sanger wrote decades ago -- that each time a woman gives birth, she goes through “the vale of death”[vi] -- still rings true. Thousands of women around the world die in childbirth every year. Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are among the highest of all the developed countries, [vii] and for African American women in the U.S., those rates are nearly three times those for white women.[viii] Yet the numbers in the United States pale by comparison with those of women in the vast majority of African nations.[ix]  Additionally, a recently published study estimates that the current bans on abortion in the U.S., if extended nationwide, would lead to a 21% increase in the number of pregnancy-related deaths overall and a 33% increase among Black women.

More and more women are choosing not to give birth in the face of these dragons.  Since the Dobbs decision,[x] which makes enforceable the laws in many states prohibiting abortion, even to save the life and health of the mother, more women of child-bearing age are seeking permanent sterilization through tubal ligations.  Others fear the lack of support for families in the U.S.  Unlike nearly every other country in the world, the United States offers no paid parental leave.  Nor does the U.S. provide much support for childcare, supporting families with a measly $500 per year per child, in contrast with Norway, which provides almost $30,000. Other countries fall in between these extremes, most offering well upwards of $10,000 per year per child.[xi] Nor does the U.S. have any provisions for paid sick leave, in comparison with over 145 other countries that do.[xii] Add to these the appalling lack of government-supported health care in the U.S., and choosing to have children in America can become quite precarious, especially for those already on the margins.  In addition, more and more couples are choosing not to give birth in the face of the dragon of climate change, as anxieties rise of what the future of the earth might portend for any child they would choose to bring into the world.

Of course, it is only in the past fifty years or so of effective contraception and evolving reproductive justice that the bearing of children has become more of a choice for women around the world.  Whether chosen or not, whether facing dragons of war or poverty, the collapse of buildings or of the earth itself, the fact remains that the vast majority of women around the world give birth.  About 250 women have given birth just in the time it will have taken you to read this.  And in that moment of bringing new life into the world, each gives the strength of their love, their body, their resilience to affirming life, goodness, possibility, and hope. As I write this, I think as well of feminist composer Margie Adam saying of women, “When we risk new possibilities, we give birth to ourselves.”[xiii]

As evidenced in the thousands upon thousands of goddess figurines found throughout the world, cultures have long honored the strength, resilience, and life-giving powers of pregnant and birthing women.  Yet, in these patriarchal times where, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, “superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills,”[xiv] our statuary tends more to memorialize men for their valor in war.  It is past time to venerate the valor of birthing women. Whether giving birth to children or to themselves in the face of the patriarchal dragon, in a rewording of the Wisdom of Sirach (44:1), [xv] let us now praise women, who gave birth to us all.

Pre-Columbian goddess figurine - Tlazolteotl

Sanger, Margaret. 1920. “Birth Control — A Parent’s Problem or Woman’s?” from Women and the New Race. In Kolmar, Wendy K. and Frances Bartkowski. 2013. Feminist Theory: A Reader. 4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill: 144-145.

 [i] Rev. 12:4.

[ii] Sister Outsider, 74.

[iii] African American babies are over twice as likely to die in the first year of their lives as white babies. In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, but  accounted for 23% of inmates. Finally, 32% of those killed by gun violence in the US are African American. 

[iv] According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average for women living on reservations, and the third leading cause of death for Native women. According to the National Crime Information Center, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the true number is probably higher. In 2020, suicide rates were highest among indigenous youth as compared to other races, and males are four times more likely to die by suicide than females.

[v] Roughly 12,000 pregnant women are incarcerated in the U.S. each year, but only about a dozen states have prison nurseries where babies can stay.  23 states still allow the shackling of women prisoners while laboring and giving birth.  A federal act that would insure against the shackling of imprisoned birthing women did not make it through Congress.  After giving birth, most incarcerated mothers are only allowed  24 hours with their newborn babies who are then either placed with relatives or in foster care.

[vi] Sanger, “Birth Control,” 145.

[vii] In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., more than double that of most other high-income countries In contrast, the maternal mortality ratio was three per 100,000 or fewer in the Netherlands, Norway, and New Zealand. The disparity is due in large part to the exceedingly low number of midwives proportionate to the number of women giving birth, in comparison to the far higher numbers in other countries.  In the U.S. the ratio is four midwives per thousand births, in comparison to Sweden with 78/1000, Austria with 75/1000, Norway with 65/1000, and similarly throughout the developed world.

[viii] Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2020 (cdc.gov)

[ix] For example, maternal mortality rates in South Sudan, Chad, and Sierra Leone are more than 1100 per 100,000 births, whereas in the US the comparable number is 17. Nevertheless, the U.S. has only the 129th lowest maternal mortality rate out of 184 countries.

[x] Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. (2022), in which the Supreme Court held that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.

[xi] On average in the U.S., parents with two small children spend between 35-40% of their income on childcare.

[xii] Nearly one in three private-sector workers, and 70% of low wage workers, cannot earn one single paid sick day. Nor can they take off work if their child is sick, so many must send their sick children to school and daycare. 

[xiii] Naked Keys,  album cover.

[xiv] The Second Sex,  64.

[xv] The original wording is, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.”