Why Women Ache

Posted on October 9, 2002 in Evolution & Creation

Two women that I know of have had their insides given a churn by miscarriages recently. The sister of one of these, Yvonne, writes:

eve, you stupid bitch, why did you eat that damn piece of fruit?….i always think if you had just stayed the fuck away from that tree, then i wouldn’t be feeling like shit right now, and i wouldn’t have had to go through 10 hours of labor to have my children, and i wouldnt’ have to go to the damn market right now to buy some always with wings, you should have listened to god you ignorant bitch!

Lynn, who is a devout Christian, rejects the myth of a God who uses our bodies to punish us. “I don’t believe God is evil,” she says. I’m not sure, myself, if there is a God. And this is a case in which I feel agnostic science grants a kinder, more accurate explanation for the discomfort and the sorrow than mythology.

Why do women suffer labor pains? We can couple this with the question “Why do men have back pains”? We’re bipedal: In our ancestors’ rise from all fours, the kinks in our backbones and our pelvises haven’t been worked out. There was no Original Sin or crime scene where sufficient forensic evidence was found to convict not only the First Woman, but all her descendants.

Conceding the imperfection of the evolving human frame liberates us from guilt. Or as I wrote in a comment to Yvonne:

Moral of the story: being a woman isn’t a crime and labor isn’t a punishment, just an accident of birth. You didn’t choose this or earn it: it just happened.

This is Life, Yvonne. Accept that it is tumultuous, that these things hurt for reasons other than punishment: then you will arrive at inner peace after spending some time at the hospice of anger about things that just don’t make sense. They don’t, but evolution had been kind enough to allow us to work out some tentative accomodations so that we may go on.