Opinion
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December 24, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The birth of my son was Hell on Earth. After putting my husband and me through physical and psychological torture, the hospital staff then tortured our baby, too, and took him from us, and it took two days of harrowing, maddening work to rescue him. It was not the birth experience my husband and I wanted for ourselves or our child – yet, in an example of God pulling good out of evil, it formed what are now some of my deepest convictions.

I remember the year following the birth. Night after night, for weeks, I would wake up in a cold sweat, thinking I’d heard a nurse knocking on our front door. My husband and I were constantly on edge, dealing with the pain and the trauma we had undergone. In piecing together how to come out of that experience and continue to grow our family, we changed. We changed how and what we ate. We changed how we viewed others. We changed everything so we could do better. 

My husband and I knew that if we were blessed with another baby, we would have a different birth. We would never put ourselves or our children in harm’s way like that again if we could help it. And we raised our boy, and we waited, and we prepared.

During Christmas, I think about how God gave us His Son so we can be redeemed and forgiven for our sins. Adam and Eve paid for their mistake of the first sins, just as my husband and I paid for our mistake of going to the hospital. The gift of the Theotokos, the new Eve and bearer of the new Adam, our Lord, was how God chose to give His people another chance. In the face of evil, our Lord condescended to be born in a humble, peaceful stable to give us hope. At long last, the Messiah had come for mankind’s redemption, and Heaven appeared on the horizon.

About a year and a half after we rescued our son from the hospital, my daughter was born, in the quiet of our home, during Eastertide. It was the perfect birth: peaceful, family-centered, and safe. Nothing compares to the comfort and tranquility of the midwife tucking me into bed with my new baby as my husband brought me steaming soup from our kitchen. After overhauling everything we had understood about childbearing and health, we had worked hard to build the environment we wanted for our precious girl. 

St. Paul says the woman “shall be saved through childbearing; if she continue in faith, and love, and sanctification, with sobriety.” I’ve now born a child in the worst way and in the best way, and those experiences shaped how I view the role of wife and mother.

With the birth of a baby, my life changed. That’s how the world changed, too – with the birth of a baby.