Lyz Lenz’s midrash on pregnancy and motherhood

As I’ve taught various religion and bioethics classes over the years, I have often felt that something was missing from the reading list. In reading Lyz Lenz’s new book, I realized what that something is: a woman’s perspective on being a body—a pre-pregnant body, a pregnant body, and a motherhood body, each of which is the subject of public debate and legislation.

Lenz presents this embodied perspective as a memoir of her own pregnancies, organizing the book around the four trimesters of pregnancy (the fourth being the first three months of a baby’s life outside the womb). Along the way, she incorporates critical commentary on the medical establishment, power, religion, and the use of technology and science. Her storytelling and critique, which she successfully blends together into a single voice, focus on the role of myths in defining women’s bodies. In describing her method, she writes, “This book is an attempt to midrash the experience of motherhood.”

Midrash seems like just the right word to describe the way Lenz combines personal experience and social criticism. She forefronts women’s experiences as the interpretive lens for rethinking the practices and institutions that govern women’s bodies. These experiences show the need for revisiting the biblical myths that are so often appealed to in discussions of womanhood and motherhood. These include the creation myth, in which a male-gendered God cobbles together a woman from part of the man’s body, and the story of the Fall, which assigns women the pains of pregnancy, labor, and mothering as punishment for Eve’s sin of eating the wrong thing at the wrong time.