Is she a mother or a “holding tank”?
By Anthony Esolen
Mosaic on the showing facade of Santa Maria in Trastevere church in Rome Mary nursing the baby Jesus
Suddenly a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” And Jesus replied, “Rather, blessed are all they who hear the word of God and keep it” (Lk. 11:27-28).
Pope Francis has recently issued a severe condemnation of surrogacy, the practice of inseminating a woman so that she will serve as a human holding tank or incubator for the child you want, a child which, because of your own debility or because you are not even a man and woman to begin with, you cannot have. He says it is a kind of rape of womanhood and motherhood, the reduction of a woman to a machine, a betrayal of the beauty and the nature of the woman’s body.
It is sometimes suggested that our society is besotted with sex. That is true in a sad and trivial sense, and yet quite false at heart. We may be obsessed, to the point of tedium, with the procuring of sexual pleasure, but we are sheathed in calluses when it comes to noticing and appreciating the distinct beauties of male and female and making them brightly manifest by our dress, our customs, and our general behavior. Even the word “mother” now is controversial. We are to call her a “pregnant person,” as if a man could ever conceive a child. Thus, what a small child once knew at a glance, the elites among us have drummed out of their own small brains by force of a most perverse will not to see, not to know.
Think then about the warmth of the relationship between mother and child, between Mary and Jesus. Giotto paints the Nativity, in the Arena Chapel, with Mary holding the child and gazing deeply into his eyes. Andrea Mantegna’s Mary, in his painting of the Presentation, grasps the child with sure and protective hands as she hears the prophecy of the aged Simeon. But that touch of the hand pales in comparison with the dwelling of the child in her womb, and the child’s taking milk from her own breast, such as we find portrayed in mosaic, from the 12th century, on the façade of Santa Maria del Trastevere, in Rome (see photo above). The opening stanza of one of the old hymns for Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation, gives us the glorious humility of it, in terms that are frankly and beautifully physical:
O gloriosa Domina excelsa super sidera, qui te creavit provide, lactasti sacro ubere.
O glorious Lady, raised high beyond the stars: He who in his providence created you, to Him have you given milk from your sacred breast.
It is a bond no man can ever know. Wealthy women used to hire wet nurses to suckle their children till they were weaned, so that they, the wealthy, could go about their business unimpeded, though it is hard for me to imagine anything more important or more beautiful than nursing the infant child. And sometimes, of course, mothers who were in ill health or whose breasts did not provide enough nourishment would need to have some other nursing woman nearby. But if we look askance at the wet nurse, as at best an unfortunate necessity, how on earth can we justify using a woman to bear and to nurse a child and then to take that child from her?
What becomes of a child so forcibly deprived of a mother, in the case of two men who so offend against the nature of motherhood — or what in every case of surrogacy becomes of the mother so forcibly deprived of the child, or what may already have become of her as she bears and nurses a stranger-to-be — we are apparently not supposed to ask. But shutting your eyes does not make the evil go away. It hardens the heart and permits the evil to set down roots and runners, till at last the whole field is overcome.
