Facing Mortality in Childbirth

Sources from essay by Maharat Rori Picker Neiss
in The Social Justice Torah Commentary

It is striking to find that in a Jewish tradition that seems so focused on reproduction, birth is something treated with repulsion rather than reverence. In the Torah, procreation is simultaneously an obligation, a blessing, and a deep desire. God commands not once but twice that the people be fruitful and multiply (Genesis I:28, 9:7), Abraham is promised that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the earth (Genesis 22:17), and we experience time and again the suffering of a mother unable to conceive in the stories of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Hannah. Yet, as this Torah portion opens with the laws pertaining to one who has given birth, the reader is left feeling neither joyful, hopeful, nor even content.

-Maharat Rori Picker Neiss

These verses are deeply unsettling, raising significant questions. Why should this performance of a commandment, this gift of life, render a person "impure," tamei? Even more outrageously, why would a person be required to bring a sin offering to make expiation? What is inherent in the act of conceiving and bearing a child that could possibly necessitate atonement?

-Maharat Rori Picker Neiss

Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, commonly known as Nachmanides or Ramban, who lived in thirteenth-century Catalonia, offers a very different reading. Rather than understand the root of the Hebrew word v'chiper, kaf-pei-resh, as "expiation" as translated in Leviticus 12:7 above, he understands the root to mean "ransom," as in Exodus 30:12, "When you take a census of the Israelite men according to their army enrollment, each shall pay the Eternal a ransom [kofer] for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled." Nachmanides does not understand the child-bearer as one in need of atonement, but instead restoration. In essence, Nachmanides, a physician as well as a philosopher and biblical scholar, recognizes that pregnancy, labor, and birth are each life-threatening. The one carrying the fetus and delivering the newborn has, in a sense, relinquished some control over their own life, giving up of their own body, physical functions, and consumed nutrients to grow and develop the future child. As the Talmud teaches, the fetus is considered "as its (parent's] thigh," meaning a part of the body of the one carrying it.' And so, according to Nachmanides, the sacrifice is a ransom paid for returning the child-bearer's body to its original owner.

-Maharat Rori Picker Neiss

The Torah commands this offering for all those who give birth, with no distinction for the status, the wealth, the age, or any other defining feature of the individual. In this way, the Torah imagines a reality in which the risk facing each person who bears a child is the same risk, and thus the ransom paid must be the same ransom. Yet, in our world today, the risk is not the same for all people.

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, considerable racial and ethnic disparities in pregnancy-related mortality exist. From the years 2011 to 2016, the pregnancy-related mortality rates showed staggering variance: the CDC recorded 42.4 deaths per 100,000 live births for Black non-Hispanic individuals, whereas white non-Hispanic individuals had less than one-third of that number, at 13.0 deaths per 100,000 live births. These figures are sobering in their barbarity...

These discrepancies do not result from natural differences between child-bearers of different ethnicities, but are byproducts of structural racism and the disparities that exist within our community and differential access to all the resources of society. Research shows that Black individuals are more likely to have pregestational diabetes and chronic diabetes, which sets them and their children up for complications and poor health outcomes. These conditions are often attributed to poor behaviors and personal health management, when they would be better blamed on environments that lack healthy foods, open spaces for safe recreation, quality and affordable health insurance to access care before and during pregnancy, education and job opportunities that permit time for leisure, and other factors intensified by structural racism.

-Maharat Rori Picker Neiss

Bringing the sacrifice after childbirth is simultaneously standing with one foot in two spaces: looking back at all that could have gone wrong and the two lives that might not have been, and looking forward to reach toward the holy, aspiring to transcendence. A birth parent is uniquely qualified to bridge these two worlds, working tobring the image of the infinite into our finite space. It is only when we recognize the potential of the infinite that we can refuse to accept the finite world as it is, instead working to remake the world into what it can be, for all people.

-Maharat Rori Picker Neiss

Discussion Questions by Ariel Tovlev

1. Tazria begins with laws of childbirth, including a period of impurity and a

   requirement for a sin offering. What is the alternative reading that Maharat

   Picker Neiss offers?

2. What are the implications of the Talmudic teaching that a fetus is considered “as

   its parent’s thigh”? How does this teaching reimagine the offering given after

   birth?

3. While childbirth bears the risk of the lives of birthing parents, as well as the lives

   of their children, childbirth is especially dangerous for people of color. More than just discrimination in medical settings, this risk is compounded by structural inequality in society. What are some of the structural inequalities that add to this risk? How can we work together to minimize this risk for all peoples?