FOR a reviewer to encapsulate the content of a book by a single author can be difficult. This volume encompasses 26 voices, each with unique truth and insight; so I am concentrating on themes and directions.

This book is “but the beginning of the birth-pangs” (Matthew 24.8). Despite the fact that Christians have always reflected theologically on our identity as human beings, the realities of female fertility have never been at the theological centre. This is surely because of taboo, squeamishness, and hierarchy (patriarchy). Fertility is a messy business. We could call it “dirty”, taking an anthropological view of dirt as being “matter out of place” rather than carrying figurative notions of “impurity” (which shifts rather too easily from the physical to the moral sphere).

In a spectrum spanning fertility to birth (and on into post-fertility), both ends of the processes involve dirt, in that sense of “matter out of place”. On this definition, saliva, e.g., within the mouth, gives us no unease. But spitting it on to the ground is likely to evoke disgust from anyone near by. Food belongs in stomachs. Food forcibly ejected is revolting. One key factor in attitudes to fertility, pregnancy, and birth is that blood leaves its safe space within the body: once it is extruded from the body, during menstruation, middle-aged menorrhagia, and childbirth, it triggers gut-reaction taboos.

Some part of this is beyond the realm of reason and the cognitive. The shock of seeing blood can make even the toughest person faint. Part of it is also cultural: a woman from a European Orthodox background once told me that women in her Church were not allowed to attend worship during their period. Without some awareness of the prevalence in modern society of blood-taboos, and the influences of those blood taboos on Christian attitudes, nothing that we do to construct theologies of pregnancy and birth will manage to forge the biological/physical and moral/spiritual spheres into a wholesome whole.

Childbirth can be frightening, especially the first time, and sometimes with good reason: the book included a sensitive take on birth-trauma. Though I did not find tokophobia (fear of giving birth), the fact of childbirth as powerlessness, a brush with death, came across clearly. This book is not only for natal female readers, but for those who are adult human males too, many of whom will have been affected in ways that few of their forefathers were by having seen their own children born. Some are traumatised by it. My own reaction to some much reported words of Robbie Williams was that he was not only joking when, asked if he was “down the business end” for his child’s birth, he declared that watching there was “like my favourite pub burning down”.

Any book as wide-ranging as this one will evoke elements of caution as well as enthusiasm. I found some of the language confusing (differentiating “feminist” and “womanist”, using terms like “natality” “un/pregnant”, or “withness”). One contributor linked “kenosis” (the self-emptying of Christ, Philippians 2.7) and the illness of pregnancy known as “hyperemesis gravidarum” (which reportedly made the then Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancies miserable), but not in a way that spoke helpfully to me.

I had more serious unease about a (short) section on “obstetric racism” (part of a reflection on 1 Timothy 2.15) and a chapter, “Pregnant and fat”, mainly because of discussions on those topics with a (white, male) friend and colleague, who was until recently a surgeon in the field of obstetrics and gynaecological oncology. Without denying the experiences of either writer, I felt that more statistical rigour and medical information was needed to enable readers to make informed judgements about some of what was presented.

I valued the inclusion of Dalit women’s experiences, and appreciated the book’s measured approach to abortion, which was more constructive than any amount of pietised theorising about fertile womanhood. Pregnancy and birth can be traumatic as well as miraculous, causing suffering as well as joy. They can spotlight the parallel disparities of wealth and pregnancy-outcome which make it an unarguable truth that all women are not created equal.

Even in the 21st century, women can feel imprisoned by their biology. We are still waiting for equality in terms of being treated as human first, female second. The individual adult human female, whatever her shape, colour, or natal sex, is not truly and fully “seen” for what she is. And yet, for 17 centuries now, we have had all the theological equipment that we need to make intellectual and spiritual sense of two persons in one substance: this book could help to forward that objective.

The Revd Dr Cally Hammond is the Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Pregnancy and Birth: Critical theological conceptions
Karen O’Donnell and Claire Williams, editors
SCM Press £30
(978-0-334-06538-8)
Church Times Bookshop £24