By Samantha Wilde
Not quite a hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own. Her extended essay on the absolute requirements for a woman to write—money and a room of her own—became a classic. Today the concept of “a room of one’s own” holds metaphoric stature in the minds of all women who all too often cannot even go to the bathroom alone.
But Woolf had her priorities wrong. A room of one’s own is not a necessity, and in many cases a luxury. I wrote my first two novels in a bedroom with a baby asleep beside me. What’s essential is having a womb of one’s own. This is the first and initial room, an inner sanctum, given to a woman*, hers and hers alone. Possessing and inhabiting this primordial inner room allows for all subsequent authority a woman will have over her life. If she doesn’t have authority over this room within her body, she does not have authority over her life. That is because the one is not separate from the other.
This room, this place and space, is humanity’s most original super-power. Nothing like it exists and it cannot be duplicated, not even by science. The power of the womb is undeniable: it gives life. Consider for a moment a force we think of as incredibly potent: the ability to kill. But anyone can kill. In fact, killing is easy. But only some can give life.
The new Texas abortion law is wrongly understood among the “religious” in a reversal of vision. Our culture mistakenly sees abortion as a spiritual issue and the violation against a woman’s right to choose as a political issue. But those who limit the rights of women to embody and possess the body given them, come entirely from a position of spiritual poverty. The refusal to sanctify a woman’s body and its holy room, the womb, as belonging to a woman, represents a critical misjudgment—of bodies, humanity and, in fact, divinity.
If we were to use Biblical references, we could understand from the first creation account in Genesis that God created male and female in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). Woman, possessor of the womb, is made in the image of God. The womb is not made holy outside of the body or the divinity of the woman in which it resides. In other words, the womb isn’t separate from the woman and the woman is made in God’s image.
Currently, the progressive among us understand such laws as the Texas abortion ban as an issue of control and power. More patriarchy and more of the same. But this understanding merely skims the surface. Those who long to control the womb do so because they long to own for themselves the greatest of all powers: the power to bring life. Lacking that, and out of a deep spiritual depravity, they seek to segregate a woman from her womb, her womb from her body.
To possess one’s own body is the most basic of all spiritual understandings and the bedrock of creation, regardless of faith tradition or religious practice. The evil of slavery, in which one person could “own” or “possess” the body of another for their own purposes perfectly exemplifies the distorted thinking that comes when we separate humanity from the body. Do we currently believe that one person’s body can belong to another person or be controlled by another person? No. Yet what we have now in this Texas abortion ban is the slavery of the womb.
We can grasp the idea that “stuff” belongs to a people. Someone takes your iPhone, it’s cut and dry theft. And if someone came into your house and rearranged your furniture or put new furniture in that you did not like, we would also consider this an illegal act committed against the homeowner. Why then can we not understand that a body belongs to a person?
A womb is a room. It is a room inside a woman’s body. It does not exist outside of her body. It cannot be taken out of her body and used. It is not separate from her heart that pumps blood into it. If the womb become sick, the woman will decide how to deal with the illness. It is hers BECAUSE it is her. And I repeat (as ministers like to do), it is her.
Missing from our conversation on womb control is spiritual understanding. We have enough religion about it. Too much in fact. But spiritual understanding elucidates the error of thinking because it is in spiritual understanding that we learn that each human is whole and complete, that while we have nose and eyes and ears, we are not separate from these parts. It is in this spiritual understanding, well described in the Genesis account I first mentioned, that we grasp the fundamental and immense truth that each individual person is in fact made in the image and likeness of their Creator. To seek to own, control, rule over or possess that person by way of their body parts—for each person is made of parts but not separate from them—is to erase that person’s essential divinity.
This is a terrible crime, no doubt. And the victims of it will undeniably suffer. But perhaps graver still is what will become of those who have betrayed the humanity and divinity of the other in the creation of this law. It may be possible to recover from having your womb used in slavery, but who can recover from spiritual bankruptcy? What we have here by the makers of this law is the exposure of a harrowing poverty of the soul. These people have forgotten what humans are for. They have made themselves the “maker” and the “creator” in a desperate, unconscious envy to have the greatest of all powers. It is to this group of people that we must ask: what has happened to your soul? It is this spiritual emptiness that we must address and HEAL. These men must know they are whole without womb or control over the womb. Only then will we all be free to live our divinity.
*For the purposes of this article I am referring to those with a womb as “woman.” I understand that some possess a womb and do not identity as “woman.” Please forgive this engagement in service to the greater message.
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