It seems everyone is talking about how there just aren’t enough babies. The worldwide birth deficit has hit Western nations hard: From the U.S. to Europe, nations have slid below the 2.1 children per woman necessary to keep population stable. But this isn’t just a Western problem. India and China are facing massive birth deficiencies of their own. Between these two countries, there are approximately 140 million fewer women of childbearing age than there are male peers. At the same time, the world is staring down a huge number of elderly people, and many of them are worried about receiving the care they need in their last years. In Japan, elderly women commit minor crimes so they can go to prison, where they enjoy regular meals, decent healthcare, and friendships; meanwhile, in Canada, the elderly face increased pressure to kill themselves.
Nadya Williams’s new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, serves as both catalog and guide in this dystopian landscape, exposing just what has brought us to this point. The problem, Williams says, is that contemporary societies value productivity but not human dignity; someone who isn’t productive is, quite simply, not valuable. This means, of course, babies and the elderly, but also the mentally ill, the disabled, the addicted, and even the able-bodied who choose to devote their lives to things that have no economic value—like mothers.
Williams knows of what she speaks. A Ph.D. from Princeton, Williams spent 15 years in academia before deciding to leave her career behind and invest her time in raising children. She is perfectly prepared to write this book; her scholarly background allows her to trace sociological and cultural threads to their historical origins, while her experience as a mother has given her insights into the unique gifts that come from caring for people who are deemed useless.
Weaving together keen sociological insights, retellings of ancient myths and histories, and thoughtful application of Scripture to current affairs, Williams exposes our culture’s darkest assumption: that each person is worth only as much as he or she can contribute to society. This begins by devaluing motherhood, Williams says, for then we devalue everyone who devotes his or her life to caring for those who cannot care for themselves or offer anything to the world except themselves. Every time we let someone say, “Oh, I’m just a mom,” and don’t honor her work, we let stand the idea that serving the vulnerable is somehow a lesser existence—when in reality it is the foundation of any society that hopes to survive.
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic is a wide-ranging survey of the ways contemporary culture has lost sight of that truth, and a bracing call for each of us to defy the pressures to valorize productivity, and instead find ways to honor the vulnerable around us.
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What Williams explores here is what I call the politics of vulnerability—not to be confused with the politics of victimhood. This is a newly vibrant area of thought. Though philosophers and political theorists have long wrestled with the role of the weak in a healthy political community, in recent years the question has become a key part of American political discourse. The politics of vulnerability explores how a society ought to treat its weakest members: the unborn, the disabled, the elderly, and terminally ill, but also the desperately poor, the uneducated, the displaced, the addicted, the mentally ill. The politics of vulnerability straddles the political aisle, appealing to pro-life advocates and opponents of euthanasia as well as to prison reformers, refugee-aid workers, and skeptics of laissez-faire capitalism.
In Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic, Williams looks to the family to understand the role that the vulnerable play in society. How, she asks, does our society support or undermine families? Do we cherish the family unit and empower it to protect the weak—newborns, pregnant and postpartum women, the elderly, the terminally ill? Or do we undermine it? Grounded in her expertise in early Christian history, she argues that Christianity gave us the gift of cherishing the vulnerable. In contrast to the might-is-right attitudes of the pagan societies of antiquity, Christianity depicted a God whose victory over death came because of his submission, his willingness to become weak. Christ, Christianity teaches us, became profoundly vulnerable; from his birth to a poor Jewish girl to his flight to Egypt to his ministry among the poor, his betrayal by a friend, his mock trial, and his death on the cross, Christ submitted to the full experience of being human—an experience that includes vulnerability.
As the title implies, Williams’s primary emphasis is on the vulnerability associated with childbirth. Mothers, the unborn, and infants are at the heart of her critique of contemporary culture. While the book is robustly pro-life, no one could level the tired accusation that Williams ceases to care about people after they are born. Rather, Williams goes back to the early Christians, those great pro-life advocates in the pro-abortion Roman world, to show how the Christian belief in human dignity should transform the way we care for all vulnerable people. The early Christians grounded their idea of human dignity not in Greek ideas of virtue or Roman ideas of duty but in the unique concept of the imago Dei:the image of God present in each person. It is that imago Dei, rather than our virtue or our heroic deeds, that grants human dignity.
Williams reminds us that this idea, which may seem rather commonplace to Christians today, was revolutionary. Never before had anyone preached that we are all equal before the divine in this way. But the message of Christianity was not only a message of equal dignity before God; combined with the Gospels’ accounts of the Passion of Christ, early Christianity developed a unique attitude toward the vulnerable.
In taking human suffering upon himself, the early Christians reasoned, Christ showed how suffering could become a door by which we enter into Christ’s own life. The Church honed this teaching over millennia, developing a beautiful and coherent framework in which vulnerability and the suffering that accompanies it should move us, both as individuals and as a society, to great charity and attention. Rather than spurning the weakest among us, as pagan societies do, we ought to cherish them as those who carry Christ’s own burdens.
This radical new perspective motivated the early Church to sell all their goods and live in community, rescue abandoned Roman babies, care for widows and orphans at the expense of their own prosperity, and share the good news of Christ with the terminally ill, the prisoners, the outcasts. Christianity did not shun the vulnerable; rather, it sought them out, and it was among them that the word of God found fertile soil.
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Williams points out that we are living through a strange new paganism that worships independence, strength, and efficiency. The dregs of Christendom, which prompted societies to cherish the elderly, protect the unborn, and offer solace to the ill, seem to be running out. In Canada and Belgium—purportedly civilized nations—the elderly, the ill, and the depressed are routinely offered assisted suicide instead of mental and physical care. In America, wealthy couples pick through custom-made embryos, choosing the ones that seem to be the most robust and discarding the others. In Iceland, almost all Down syndrome babies are killed in the womb. Besides these brutal practices, there are subtler indications that our society rejects weakness. Postpartum women are expected to return to work mere weeks after delivery, while the elderly dither out their final days in nursing homes, shut away from view.
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic does not simply point out how the vulnerable come under attack in our newly pagan society. In perhaps her most important insight, Williams asks us to consider what lessons we are not learning from the vulnerable, who in many ways are the wisest among us. What lessons are lost when we eliminate Down syndrome children from our communities? What do we not learn about God and ourselves when the elderly are pushed to the edges of society, or even nudged into assisted suicide? How does it coarsen and brutalize us all to treat pregnant women as liabilities and the unborn as disposable?
Williams is not alone in asking these questions. As it becomes clear that we have crossed a boundary in our society’s attitude toward the vulnerable, there has been a surge of scholarly and popular work on these questions from theologians, sociologists, lawyers, and philosophers. Williams’s book serves as a veritable Who’s Who of American Christian writers on this topic: Ivana Greco, Tara Isabella Burton, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and Erika Bachiocci, among others, receive thoughtful mentions, making Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic a valuable compendium of the contemporary discourse about vulnerability and social responsibility.
Combating a culture of death starts by having the courage to see the horrors unfolding around us. But that is just the beginning. While advocacy and policy changes are necessary to restore a culture of life, Williams encourages us to consider the personal, to actively seek human connection with those who are vulnerable.
Williams offers a case study of the so-called Dying with Dignity movement, which now advocates for assisted suicide for individuals suffering from mental illness and even loneliness. While of course we must push for laws to protect these vulnerable people, Williams reminds us that we must also address the underlying cause of their despair by extending consolation and compassion, and showing them—through day-to-day relationships—that their lives are gifts. “Consolation,” she writes, “can be any pro-life relational action.”
Williams notes how through Scripture and church history, God extends respect to those considered useless; he cares for these people physically, yes, but also relationally. She points out how God himself appears to Hagar, the mistreated slave of Abraham and Sarah—something he does not do to nearly anyone else in the Bible. The deacons of the church in Rome bring the young imprisoned mother Perpetua food and clothing, but they also bring her writing implements to solace her mind. Williams challenges us to look beyond nationwide political actions and into our own lives and communities: Whom do we know who feels useless, neglected, forgotten? How can we bring consolation and compassion into those lives? This consolation is not, Williams says, merely in the form of material donations; it is also a matter of offering our time and attention, and discerning how we can show respect to the minds, desires, and wisdom of the vulnerable.
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While the book is a concise, well-researched summary of the attacks on human dignity spreading through our society today, its title does not do it full justice. Yes, it does indeed devote attention to mothers and children, but it ranges far beyond those states, and the titular emphasis on these more feminine topics might put off male readers. It should not. Just as society suffers as a whole when we neglect mothers and children, men who ignore Williams’s book will miss out on key insights into the state of our society and the path forward.
In the end, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic is a beautiful vehicle for a paradoxical truth that early Christianity knew but we are quickly forgetting today: the weak save us from ourselves. This holds true for individuals and communities, but also for states and nations. In a society that increasingly values only the strong, the young, the healthy, the successful, Williams’s reminder could not be more timely.
