The mess, grit, and dirt of the post-partum stable

No cheerleaders, nor midwives, no older women who had walked Mary's path before.

Imogen Ball

Imogen is a writer, mum, and priest on a new housing development in the South-West of England.

A Korean style historic illustration of the nativity.

Kim Hueng Jong (Korean, 1928-), Christmas Scene.

Clean, calm and collected,

That’s how it would have been.

The stable of filtered imaginings,

A picture perfect scene.

Perhaps more messy -

Undignified, unexpected, unseemly -

A not-so dream-like site,

As a king’s birthing barn that night.

Our unimagined stable.

No perfectly planned polaroid,

But in mess, mud, blood,

Is God with us

The stable of our Christmas cards, illuminated shop window scenes, and our children’s nativity plays is neat and tidy. A newborn babe lies quietly sleeping in a straw-filled trough, wrapped perfectly in a Persil white blanket. The mother, clothed and clean, looks on adoringly, standing over her child. Any animals present are gentle, still, and lying on the ground, unaffected by this unusual occurrence in their home. This is the stable of our imaginations.

However, the Bethlehem stable was the delivery suite for the Saviour of the world. And even a Saviour’s birth includes mess. I have experienced a variety of delivery rooms over my three pregnancies and each one has been messy. From birthing pool to theatre there is noise, blood, water, and tears. Birth is messy. And that’s not even beginning to acknowledge the mess that would have been in the stable to begin with! Despite this, the stables we see and celebrate never include the mess that Jesus would have been born into.

Birth is also extreme. It pushes the woman’s body to the limit of her physical and emotional capacity. She has laboured - aptly named for it is indeed hard work. Her body has been torn to enable this little life to be pushed or pulled into the world. She is exhausted. And now the work begins to sustain this little one outside of the womb. While inside he has been given all that he needs, now outside they must learn together how to feed. As the newborn babe is held close to his mother, he recognises her rhythmic heartbeat, his temperature regulates, his smell and touch encourages her milk to develop, and as he feeds, he contracts her womb for the placenta to be born and her body to begin to heal. They are still dependent on each other in these early hours.

Usually, this extreme and messy moment is done in community. It is not something we embark on alone. We have a support network of skilled people to help and guide us through birth. We have birth partners who encourage us, champion us, and remind us of our body’s innate ability to birth this baby. But Mary did not have this normal group of cheerleaders. There were no midwives at her birth, no older women who had walked this path before. Only her new husband, afraid and unsure of what his young wife was about to do. And then soon after, the Shepherds arrived. A bunch of slightly smelly, nocturnal chaps walking into a delivery room. Although they would have been familiar with mess, noisy animals, and birth, I’m not sure I would have rejoiced at their unexpected arrival. Somehow though, Mary graciously welcomes them into the space of what was probably a very messy stable.

Perhaps instead of the sanitised stable of our imaginations, we might consider an alternative imagining - the messy stable of the Saviour. A stable where the humanness of birth, of mother and child, and of life’s mess is fully felt. Because it was into the mess, grit, and dirt that the Saviour came. And it was from this mess that he was going to save.

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Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Culture

Politics

3 December 2024

5 min read

The assisted dying debate revealed the real role of Parliament

MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

An MP stands and speaks in a parliamentary debate.

MP Diane Abbott speaks in the debate.

Parliament TV.

What would be the effect of allowing assisted suicide for those ‘people who lack agency, the people who know what it is to be excluded from power and to have decisions made for them’, asked Danny Kruger MP, as he wrapped up his speech? ‘What are the safeguards for them? Let me tell the House: we are the safeguard—this place; this Parliament; you and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role.’

His words capture an important aspect of Friday’s debate: what is the point of Parliament? Do MPs meet to turn public opinion polls into policies? If the majority are in favour of something, do MPs have nothing left to do but to follow the public and sort out the fine details? We might instinctively say ‘Yes!’ It seems right and democratic to treat those whom we elect as people we select and send to do our bidding. And the polls do seem to show the majority of people supporting assisted suicide, at least in principle – although there are good reasons to be sceptical about those figures and about the conclusions drawn from them.

But there are numerous times when the majority are known to be in favour of something but politicians refuse to endorse it. Polls repeatedly show that a majority are in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. Why might it be right for MPs sometimes to ignore what the purported majority thinks and to use their own judgement?

Because Parliament is not just a debating chamber.

An older way of referring to it was to call it the ‘High Court of Parliament’ because ‘parliament, classically, was where individuals could seek the redress of grievances through their representatives,’ as law lecturer Dr Robert Craig writes. It performed its function admirably in response to the Horizon scandal: a legitimate grievance was brought to its attention, and it responded to redress the wrongs done to the sub-postmasters by passing a law to ‘overturn a series of judgments that could only have been obtained, and were only obtained, by a toxic, captured and wilfully blind corporate culture’.

Friday’s debate featured many MPs who understood what they were there to do. They acknowledged the ‘terrible plight of the people who are begging us for this new law’ as Danny Kruger said. But they also spoke up for those who were in danger of being harmed and wronged by the bill: the disabled and the dying, and all the vulnerable who were not there to speak on their own behalf.

Many echoed the concerns expressed by Diane Abbott about coercion: ‘Robust safeguards for the sick and dying are vital to protect them from predatory relatives, to protect them from the state and, above all, to protect them from themselves. There will be those who say to themselves that they do not want to be a burden. … Others will worry about assets they had hoped to leave for their grandchildren being eroded by the cost of care. There will even be a handful who will think they should not be taking up a hospital bed.’ And evidence of coercion is hard to find and trace: ‘Coercion in the family context can be about not what you say but what you do not say—the long, meaningful pause.’

An analysis shared on X by law lecturer Philip Murray found an association between the level of deprivation in a constituency and how likely a Labour MP was to vote against the bill. He also shared figures showing that 2/3 of MPs from ethnic minorities voted against it. In other words, MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers of helping people to kill themselves.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm.

But it seems that many MPs did not appreciate what the debate was about or what they had gathered to do. Layla Moran MP said: ‘The media are asking all of us, “Are you for or against the Bill?”, but I urge hon. Members to think about the question differently. The question I will be answering today is, “Do I want to keep talking about the issues in the Bill?”’ But James Cleverly MP intervened: “she is misrepresenting what we are doing at this point. We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill.” He was right to be impatient. Unlike the Oxford Union, the vote has consequences. Parliamentarians are not there merely to debate. As the term ‘High Court of Parliament’ suggests, when MPs (either on their own initiative or as a government) propose bills, what they are often doing is conveying a plea to redress some grievance, and their debates are to decide whether to respond by making laws to grant justice to the wronged.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm, because the scrutiny that the bill will undergo in the following stages is not likely to be as rigorous as with government bills. As a Private Member’s Bill, the assisted dying proposal is free to be scrutinised by a committee selected by the MP who has proposed the bill, i.e. Kim Leadbeater. When the bill reaches the stage for a final vote in the Commons at the third reading, no further amendments can be made and the time for debate is likely to be short.

It is rare but bills are sometimes defeated at the third reading. With eighteen abstentions on Friday and at least thirty-six MPs claiming they might change their minds later, there is still hope.

Each sitting of the Commons begins every day with a prayer by the Speaker’s Chaplain, who prays that MPs ‘may they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices, keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’

We can only hope and pray that at their next opportunity, MP will consider this bill in light of their responsibilities as the country’s High Court, charged with protecting the most vulnerable in society from harm.