How the Womb Reveals the Dignity of Woman

In the Incarnation, God became “one flesh” with human nature. Through the womb of a woman, God chose to reveal himself to his creatures. Have you ever stopped to meditate on this mystery? If this is true, and it is, then what does this tell us about the dignity of woman? Each and every woman. What does it reveal about how captivated God must be by the beauty of the female body - particularly her reproductive system? If this is so important to God, shouldn’t it also be important to us? For God so loved the world that he sent his only son to us - through the womb of a woman.

Heaven met earth in the womb of a woman. God has had a glorious plan for the womb since before the world began. Imagine how He must rejoice with each new life within the womb. Each new life participates in the glory of the Incarnation. Therefore, each woman, because of God’s design of her body, in some way participates in the glory of the Incarnation. Every woman ought to be awestruck when she considers the dignity with which she was created.

When a woman acknowledges her dignity, she should next consider what her response to God should be in light of this knowledge. With free will, Mary responded with her Fiat: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word”. This foreshadows the words of her son Jesus, at the Last Supper: “This is my body given up for you”. A woman can use her free will to echo Mary’s response or she can choose to respond in a selfish way: “This is my body. I will do with it what I please.”

The sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, was to disregard God’s declaration of what was right and wrong. They used their free will to say no to His plan by preferring their own way. If the womb of a woman was the instrument chosen by God to carry out His plan for our salvation, it makes sense that it would be the place where Satan would aim his most vicious attacks. Even still, Satan was definitively defeated by the “yes” of a humble teenage girl who allowed her womb to be used to deliver our Savior.

This is depicted in the Book of Revelation, where the “great dragon” appears in order to “devour” the offspring of the woman. We might not recognize the work of this dragon in our modern times but he is alive and well, thriving on the deception in clinics and hospitals seemingly devoted to women’s health. Nowhere else in medicine do we prescribe treatments that either temporarily or permanently cause a healthy part of the body to cease to function. We see the dragon at work in our abortion clinics where so many lives are lost, over 50 million in the United States since 1973. We see the dragon operating in the American Academy of Pediatrics, who in 2014 declared that all pediatricians have a duty to encourage sexually active teens to consider using long-acting reversible contraceptive implants that would render them sterile for several years so that they can have “safe sex”. We see this dragon at work in families and churches where parents and church leaders remain silent out of fear, confusion or indifference rather than speaking the truth about God’s plan for their sexuality believing that teens will “figure it out on their own”.

Women, it is time to reconsider your dignity. You are the living icon of heaven’s dwelling place on earth. You have immense worth in the eyes of your Creator. It’s time for you to learn more about how God designed your body. It is good. It is beautiful. It is holy. Once you understand this, you can respond to God in a way that allows Him to reveal to you how his design reflects your dignity. The whole world is waiting for your Fiat.