ABSTRACT
A woman’s capacity to create, bear, and nurture a child is the very essence of her womanhood, her unique and special capacity – prized, feared, envied, protected, and celebrated. Birth is the only defence against the inevitability of death, an intimation of our immortality, of our new hope for the future. When a woman has a child, she confirms for herself and for others that she is a complete woman, fertile and capable of the biological task of creating and perpetuating life. She rivals her own mother, by becoming mother of a child in her turn, and completes the reproductive cycle that began with her own conception in her mother’s womb.
