Your Body was Designed by God.

Your body was designed by God.

This is such a simple statement that it’s easy to overlook its profundity. God, the Creator of the Universe, of mountains and oceans and stars and planets, created your body. Your body.

So what does this mean?

It means that your body, even with its myriad flaws, is an intricate system whose functions far surpass the human capacity to understand it, much less replicate it or improve upon it. I feel confident in saying that there is far more going right in your body than there is going wrong, simply by the mere fact that your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, and your mind is thinking. If you are expecting a baby, it is growing a whole other human being! Your body is a marvel, and it should inspire awe and wonder!

It also means that living and moving in your body is an opportunity to have an intensely personal relationship with God. Your being, body and soul, is the connection to the Divine Creator, so what you do with your body matters. At its most basic level, we accomplish God’s will by doing what He asks of us: working, loving, praying. At its most intense, having this God-designed body allows us to receive the Holy Eucharist—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity—into our very selves. The most intimate connection we as Catholics have with God is the ability to receive Him into our very bodies.

How does this relate to birth?

We live in a culture of highly medicalized births. While advances in medicine can and do result in the development of lifesaving procedures, they also have their drawbacks. Gone is the wonder and mystery that surround birth as a process designed by God, where life is held in the balance. Reverence has been replaced by clinical utilitarianism, and wonder has been replaced by control. Rather than waiting as birth unfolds according to God’s design and only intervening when necessary, birth practitioners often focus on collecting data (for example, checking dilation) and ultimately, suffer from the illusion that humans can somehow master birth.

What if each and every mother, father, and birth practitioner chose to honor God’s design, to put trust in Him and in the movement of the Holy Spirit? What if we used faith and wisdom and experience to determine if and when an intervention is necessary, rather than assuming a posture of control from the start? 

I believe that adopting this model for birth (respectful and watchful waiting) would result in safer births with a renewed reverence for God’s design. It would allow women to reconnect with the awe and wonder of birth, as well as the personal connection to the Divine that God so desires for us. It would allow women to begin this new chapter of motherhood knowing they are daughters of a loving God.

Ultimately, a shift in our attitude toward birth would change the lives of mothers and babies, change their families, and in so doing, it would change the world.

What do you think? Can we respond to God this way, one family at a time?