It is implacable, and our efforts to fob something less costly off on our children are always bitterly resented. The insights of modern psychology affirm that our compromises in this respect do not ultimately succeed. Both we and our children pay for it in the end. The womb is the tabernacle in which the developing and sacred life of the unborn child is nurtured. Yet it comes eventually in the form of post-abortion suffering, so often described not merely as sadness and remorse but as a kind of haunting .
Scripture recognizes barrenness as a curse for woman, an unnatural state, a life-long sorrow.
Today, one of the fruits of feminism in this country is a large number of professionally successful but sorrowing middle-aged women who learned, too late, that childbearing cannot be postponed indefinitely. With Houselander we see that neither celibacy nor physical barrenness need be an obstacle to fruitful mothering. Just as our own offspring eventually loom over us and leave our domain to create lives and families of their own, the spiritual mystery we give birth to will eventually surpass us, move out beyond us, and reach further than we could hope to reach ourselves. The divine life taking flesh within us has the potential to surprise both us and the world. It is the incarnation of God that makes possible the priesthood as we know it.