The Preciousness of All Humanity
A Review of
Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity
Nadya Williams
Paperback: IVP Academic, 2024
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Reviewed by C. Ben Mitchell
By some accounts, if you could harvest and sell all the organs, tissues, and chemicals in your body, you could make around $500,000 USD. One source estimates that in the right market, healthy human body parts could fetch as much as $45 million. There is an old saying that there’s nothing certain but death and taxes. The good news is that your heirs would have plenty of money to pay your taxes post-mortem.
Of course, that’s not the only way of placing value on a human life. One metric is earning potential over one’s career. How much money and other assets could you accrue over, say, a 30-year career? Another metric is the cost of food, shelter, and medical care over a lifetime. When insurance companies calculate liability for injuries they consider medical costs, lost wages, pain and suffering, potential future costs, and the list goes on. But given we’re talking about the price of a human being, these seem to be rather crude metrics. What’s the value of a person made in the image of God?
Part of Nadya Williams’s burden in Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic, is to take up the question of how cultures have valued human beings and, at times, de-valued certain image bearers of God, namely mothers and children. She knows. In the summer of 2023, Williams left a fully tenured academic post as a historian to become a full-time mom while also homeschooling her children. Many of her friends and colleagues were aghast! How, in this day of feminist liberation, could she forfeit a professional career to become a traditional wife and mother? Some of her colleagues saw her almost as a traitor.
Much of the feminist literature she had just been reading argued that children were a burden and that women with no children were happier than women with children. Was this necessarily the case or was it an artifact of a contemporary cultural myth? Should she be swayed by the 2022 Bloomberg headline that women without children can be richer than men? And, even if it were true, does that mean motherhood and children are unworthy of the sacrifice?
Like a good physician, Williams begins by examining the patient’s symptoms, exposing the ways the devaluation of motherhood and children manifests itself in our society. At best, contemporary society is ambivalent about children and motherhood; at worst antagonistic. After all, she observes, although pregnancy is a normal aspect of female fertility, “women’s health” is often equated with not being pregnant. There is something suspicious about seeing the functions of a healthy woman’s body as a pathology that needs to be medicalized in the application of drugs, devices, and surgery to keep it from working normally.
If that’s not enough, where babies are welcome, only “perfect” offspring are desired. Consider how a prenatal genetic diagnosis often guides many couples to choose to not have offspring who don’t meet quality control standards. Iceland, for instance, claims to have eliminated Down Syndrome from the country. In reality, they have eliminated Down Syndrome children through prenatal testing and abortion, not by eliminating the condition.
As a trained classist, Williams finds the cultural status quo (which someone said is Latin for “the mess we’re in”) eerily familiar with the ways women and children were disvalued in the ancient, pre-Christian Mediterranean world. In the creation myth of the Greek gods Prometheus and Zeus, Pandora is created as the first woman. Of course, we’ve heard the rest of the story. Her curiosity tempted her to open an accursed jar (not a box) unleashing plagues and disease into the world. She was made, as Hesiod put it, “with the mind of a bitch,” becoming the prototypical woman who makes men’s lives miserable. Thus, in the ancient Mediterranean world women were seen as a necessary evil given the need to procreate.
Like our contemporary tendency to embrace a eugenic mindset, preferring the “fittest” offspring over those with disabilities, the ancients were not kind to people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. Infanticide and child abandonment were deeply embedded in early Roman society. Williams’s familiarity with the literature of the period helps her readers see the disvalue placed on women and children in a culture bereft of Jewish and Christian anthropology.
Also the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church: A Historical and Practical Introduction to Christians in the Greco-Roman World (Zondervan, 2023), Nadya Williams is well equipped to tell the story of the early church’s resistance movement against the pagan culture. She points to historical examples, the noblewoman, Perpetua (c.182-203 AD) and her pregnant friend, Felicity, and St. Augustine (354-430 AD), showing how early Christians valued motherhood, children, and other vulnerable people. She also employs the contemporary agrarian poet, novelist, and essayist, Wendell Berry, to make the case that Christlike love values every human being because we are fearfully and wonderfully made by a gracious Creator.
Williams’s work is chastening to those who claim to be pro-life, but who do not seem to value life equally across life’s spectrum, from womb to tomb, and everywhere in between. This is a rich, accessible, and at times moving volume. “In Christ,” she reminds us, “every human life is precious, not because of anything a person might do or because of a person’s sociopolitical status or any other factor, but simply because a person exists” (137).
C. Ben Mitchell
C. Ben Mitchell, Ph.D., is a biomedical ethicist and author who has taught in seminaries and universities across the country. His newest volume,Bioethics and Medicine: A Short Companion, is due out by B&H Academic in September 2025.
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