Digital Continent Summer 2017 | Page 48

39 the popular understanding of gender picks and chooses which parts of the body contain great personal significance. This tendency, however, to pick and choose bodily significance is not unreasonable when various aspects and parts of the body lack apparent significance, or appear to lack significance entirely. For example, does the fact that a human body may have an even or odd number of cells at a given time significantly affect personhood? What of birthmarks? What of the vestigial appendix? Alexander Pruss offers a helpful distinction to answer these questions when he explains that the general triviality of a body part cannot prove, and therefore ascribe, universal triviality to that body part. He answers that in regards to an embryo or fetal human being, the number of cells in the body may very well carry great significance. 138 In regards to birthmarks, they become significant when people make fun of us for them. 139 In regards to the appendix, it is most certainly serious whether or not the appendix becomes inflamed. 140 Even some difference is an important difference in the life of a human being. Though many parts of the body are trivial throughout our lives, there will always be a context or a situation in which a body part matters greatly. In regards to gender, the distinct and different body parts associated with males and females matter greatly, because they condition the human person’s life and subtly influence the individual’s worldview. The female womb offers a compelling example. The womb is an internal organ embodying the functional concept of gestation, supporting and nurturing a new human life. Precisely, by womb, I refer to the Mullerian system, the entire design of the ovaries (producing eggs), fallopian tubes (for carrying the eggs into the uterus), uterus (a space set aside in the body for new human life), and vaginal canal (through which new human life enters the wider world). I have simplified the medical complexities of the Mullerian system into the concept of womb to suit the scope of this thesis. The significance of the womb – its brute fact presence within the body of a woman – however subtly or grossly, influences the mental and physical growth of the feminine person. In her great psychological study of women, Helen Deutsch claims that childbirth reveals how ecstasy and triumph are the cornerstones of motherhood, because the mother (in the case of physical childbirth) desires to persevere through the pains of her childbirth, claiming the action of childbearing as her own. 141 She writes that “[h]uman mothers differ from animal mothers in that their relation with their child is accomplished through rational effort accompanied by emotions and ideas.” 142 A woman’s very body remains open to childbearing – by its form, its function, its design. Even amidst the loss of biological function (issues of fertility), a woman 138 Ibid, 199. Ibid. 140 Alexander Pruss, One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 199. 141 Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1945), as cited in, Kathleen Curran Sweeney, “The Perfection of Woman as Maternal and the Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 9, no.2 (2006): 141. 142 Ibid. 139