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Waiting for Delivery: Counseling Pregnant Women as an Issue for the Church

To await delivery is an advent-like event in the life of a woman. She is usually “in high spirits,” we say, anticipating the religious and spiritual meaning of the experience. Liturgically, Christians celebrate periods of preparation and waiting before Christmas and Easter. We would expect to find rituals that celebrate pregnancy in the lives of Christian women as well, accompanying them along their “path of advent and awaiting.” One might expect too that counseling pregnant women would be traditional work of Christian communities; yet, in fact, neither pre-birth rituals nor counseling are common. We find few rituals in the official liturgies of Christian churches, and church rituals seem not to be primary shapers of the meaning of pregnancy. What we find in most churches are rites around baptism or initiation of the child after delivery. The child is the center of the liturgical shaping, the texts and songs, the reflections and admonitions. The woman herself, especially her body in its many steps of transformation, but also her feelings, hopes, personal experiences, and social changes, has not been a special issue for the church, either before or after the woman gives birth. This lacuna exists in the pastoral care of faith communities, and also in the theological education of pastors. Only in folk traditions and rural regions do we find rituals preparing women for delivery. In Jewish and Christian prayer collections for women’s “home religiosity,” we also find supportive texts for women awaiting birth. In official rites, however, the time before birth seems not to be an issue for the church’s ministry or the faith community’s life. The blind spot also exists in practical theology. Little practical theological attention is given to the significance of women’s experiences in pregnancy, theological issues of pregnancy, or the pastoral and ritual care of pregnant women. This is curious, given a woman’s unique experience in having a new person growing for nine months in her womb.