St. Bridget and Abortion

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abortion, birth control, Catholic Church, St. Bridget

This semester, students in my Women as Healers class at Arizona State University are reading Sex and Herbs and Birth Control. One young man, Brian Anderson, was so intrigued by the story behind the title of chapter 3, “Praying to St. Bridget,” that he decided to do further research on the saint for his first essay. (The chapter title comes from the St. Bridget amulet that some Irish women wear to protect themselves from pregnancy — see the post “Loss of Indigenous Knowledge in Veracruz, Mexico”.) Brian discovered a fascinating 2002 article by Judith Maas in the Irish Times. Titled “St. Bridget would vote No if faced with this referendum,” the article expressed opposition to a proposed amendment to Ireland’s anti-abortion law that would increase the punishment for anyone obtaining an abortion to twelve years’ imprisonment. The author pointed out that St. Bridget, though an abbess of the Catholic Church and a patron saint of fertility, was willing to help women in desperate circumstances:

“A symbol of motherhood, Bridget is also known as Muire na nGael — Mary of the Gael. However, if necessary, she did not hesitate to interfere with nature. In the first Life of Saint Bridget, written by Cogitatus around AD 650, a woman in crisis pregnancy came to her for help. ‘A certain woman who had taken the vow of chastity fell, through youthful desire and pleasure, and her womb swelled with child. Bridget, exercising with the most strength of her ineffable faith, blessed her, caused the foetus to disappear, without coming to birth, and without pain. She faithfully returned the woman to health and to penance.’ This account of an abortion cannot be found in current translations of the book. In the 19th century it vanished from the official version of St. Bridget’s life….

“In the early Middle Ages, abortion wasn’t considered a serious crime. The Penitential of St. Finnian states that ‘if a woman by her magic destroys the child she has conceived, she shall do penance for half a year.’ This is mild compared to other penalties and compared to the proposed 12 years’ jail in the current proposal for the abortion referendum.” (Irish Times, 5 March 2002)

It is not surprising that when the Church’s stance on abortion changed in the 19th century (see the post “Questions to Ask Your Priest”), the Church also changed the official biography of St. Bridget. Church authorities have consistently attempted to conceal the fact that earlier Catholic notables such as St. Bridget, Hildegarde of Bingen, Tomas Sanchez, and others had more flexible attitudes toward abortion.

Loss of Indigenous Knowledge in Veracruz, Mexico

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degradation of knowledge, indigenous, loss of knowledge, midwives, Nahua, northern Veracruz, St. Bridget

In a chapter of Sex and Herbs and Birth Control titled “Praying to St. Bridget,” I commented on the numerous reasons why herbal folk knowledge of fertility regulation can become devalued, degraded, or lost over time. The chapter’s title comes from a notable example of this phenomenon: in their efforts to prevent pregnancy, some young Irish women of today wear a St. Bridget’s amulet containing a tiny piece of seaweed. As it happens, several kinds of seaweed, including kelp and sea lettuce, can act as a reasonably effective barrier-type contraceptive, especially if used in conjunction with a spermicide such as lemon juice or a motility reducer such as honey or oil. St. Bridget, a medieval midwife of great renown, probably knew this — in the Middle Ages midwives, even Catholic ones, often knew many folk methods of contraception and abortion. Over time, however, the knowledge of midwives such as St. Bridget was lost, and young Irish women are left with the absurd practice of putting bits of seaweed around their necks and praying to St. Bridget.

There are countless examples of this type. Some are alarming, some are amusing, but all represent an impoverishment of the cultural and ethnobotanical resources available to women of reproductive age. It is particularly distressing that the degradation of knowledge can happen surprisingly quickly, sometimes even in the span of one generation; I give several instances of this in Sex and Herbs and Birth Control.

Recently, Rachel Hughes, a student in my Women as Healers class at Arizona State University, brought to my attention a 2008 article in Economic Botany by Vania Smith-Oka which chronicles the rapid disappearance of knowledge of plants used for reproductive health among indigenous Nahua women of northern Veracruz, Mexico. The author notes several reasons for the precipitous decline in herbal use among Nahua women, including the tendency to have their babies at a clinic or hospital under the care of an allopathic physician rather than at home under the guidance of a midwife; globalization and the consequent identification of western biomedicine as “modern” while Nahua midwifery is stigmatized as backward; and the fact that young women generally do not wish to apprentice with indigenous midwives, but choose instead to go to the cities to take up “more prestigious careers such as accounting or law.”

In many parts of the world indigenous groups employ a mixture of allopathic and folk healing modalities. However, the incursions of Pentacostal religions into northern Veracruz have militated against this type of blending of the old and new. The Pentacostalists have condemned all plants used either in the Nahua pharmacopoeia or in Catholic ritual as sorcery or “of the devil.” As Smith-Oka dryly notes, by these criteria “the list of ‘harmless’ plants is quite short.”

Another factor contributing to the rapid decline of herbal use is the peculiar character of midwifery among these Nahua. Knowledge of herbs that induce sterility, prevent pregnancy, or cause abortion is jealously guarded by individual midwives as proprietary information and kept secret from both patients and rival midwives. This contrasts sharply with many indigeneous communities in Mexico and elsewhere — including ones not far from those studied by Smith-Oka — that have a collective, shared knowledge base. The bottom line is that, once the current generation of midwives in northern Veracruz ceases to practice, their knowledge of contraceptive, sterility-inducing, and abortifacient plants will likely be lost.