How It Works In Loss

And the Lord God said unto the serpent . . . . I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.  Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children . . . --Genesis 3:14-16, KJV.

Eve, Adam's partner in sin, is told that her offspring will suffer in the face of a hostile world, and Eve is told that child-bearing--the experiential source of humanity's continuance--will be an agony for her.

Adam is told that the woman will desire him--a fleshly inducement for him to provide for his family--and he is told that the effect of the curse on him will be hard work and his own death.  Poor Adam.  Even the snake--told that its offspring will experience deadly struggle against humanity--is confronted with a curse in the form of suffering of creatures with which it might identify.  But Adam?  His life is just going to mostly stink, that's all.  Not a word is expended on the notion that he is going to care about anyone else but himself.  (Though it must be admitted--if the general description of the first patriarchs holds for him--that he will have ample opportunity to expend himself in at least the outward expressions of affection; he can be expected to have experienced sexual potency for most of a thousand years.)

And Adam does get to learn that his transgression will lead to suffering--through a cursed Creation and its damned creatures--a thousand-fold greater than the suffering of the snakes, but the only focus here is on how Adam's gastronomic experiences are going to suck.

Lost, apparently, in three or four thousand years of humanity ruminating about the curses of Eden, is one salient fact.  The overall process of child-bearing--the life-long, consciousness-defining aspect of the life of being female--ought first and foremost to be understood not in terms of the agony of giving life, but in the agony of bearing death.  A solid half of pregnancies (in Bible days as now) are never completed.  Women bear within themselves a process of death.

Women give birth to persons, knowing all along that those persons will eventually die, and as a culture in the Western world we reckon that an unfortunate portion of women will know what it is to have a child die.  I say "reckon" guardedly, because that is one of the most obtuse reckonings made in all of human civilization.  If we reckon forthrightly with the process, most women who become pregnant a few times (and most women who might chance to become pregnant a few times) have lost offspring--whether they have known it or not.

Women are not chiefly bound together by the largely-experienced phenomenon of being bearers of life, but more typically by being bearers of death.  Women, in the implacable working-out of the curse, are born with death inside them.  For this fact, individual women are not to blame.  Yet it is just as much a fact--if we are to forthrightly apply our enlightened notions of civil support--that women (in what they know they experience, or what they must experience in the suspicions about what might reside in each issue of blood, or in the youthful experience of dreading the impending dark possibilities of child-bearing), women, I say, are survivors of dreadful trauma, and are deserving of social support.

This leads unavoidably to the great dark horror of the abortion debate.  If women are to be given to understand that the conceptus they might abort is fully human, where then is the societal reckoning on the inescapable fact that any conceptus--indeed, even the maternal expectation of a developing conceptus--must be reckoned as fully human, even in loss?  A woman who has a positive pregnancy test followed by a negative can be counseled all we might about false-positives, but who are we to decide that she ought not from that time forward--perhaps even for her entire life--be provided with civil supports as a trauma survivor?

Indeed, as I will attempt to show, the very idea of a civil society--of a government ostensibly directed toward safeguarding and/or providing social goods--is, in the common human endeavor, fundamentally flawed, and this flaw reaches as deeply toward our core values as the very ideas we have of families and individuals.  Left or right, our politics and economics revolve on questions of gain--on productivity of what might be produced, or distribution of what might be distributed--when the true common endeavor of humanity ought to be addressing the phenomenon of loss.