Is childbirth sinful?

Leviticus does not say that having a baby is a sin. Chapter 12 belongs to the laws of clean and unclean (Leviticus 11–15), which concern fitness to come near God’s sanctuary, not moral guilt. Many things that were no wrong at all made a person unclean: a husband and wife coming together (15:18), a woman’s monthly period (15:19), touching a dead body (Numbers 19:11), even when burying a relative was a duty. The mother’s uncleanness came from the bleeding after the birth, “the issue of her blood” (Leviticus 12:7), and when the set time was over, “she shall be cleansed”.

The offering called a ‘sin offering’ (Hebrew chattath, Strong’s H2403) was used for cleansing as well as for sins. It was offered for the altar itself when it was first consecrated, which had committed no sin (Exodus 29:36), and for a healed leper, “him that is to be cleansed from his uncleanness” (Leviticus 14:19). In Leviticus 12 the atonement goes with cleansing: “the priest shall make an atonement for her, and she shall be clean” (12:8). For this reason many modern scholars render chattath ‘purification offering’. Keil and Delitzsch likewise explain the offerings as the way the priest declared a person clean and received her back into the fellowship of the holy God. Mary, the mother of Jesus, brought this very offering after his birth (Luke 2:22-24), and no Christian supposes that bearing him was a sin.

The rest of Scripture treats children as a gift: “children are an heritage of the Lord” (Psalm 127:3), and the first command to bear them came with God’s blessing (Genesis 1:28). Gill asked the question directly, ‘is it sinful to bear and bring forth children in lawful marriage, where the bed is undefiled?’ His answer was that it had respect ‘not so much to any particular sin of her’s, as of her first parent Eve’: the pains of childbirth came from Eve’s transgression, and every child inherits the corruption that came with it. On that view the offering pointed to the fallen state of mankind, not to a sin committed in bearing a child. Whatever 1 Timothy 2:15 means exactly (see below), it speaks of childbearing as a way in which a believing woman is kept, not as a sin.

A reminder of the fall

Haley quotes several older writers who held that all the rites of purification reminded Israel that it belonged to a fallen race, needing a cleansing it could not give itself. On this view the offering speaks of human nature since the fall, when pain in childbirth began (Genesis 3:16), not of any sin in the act of giving birth.

‘Saved in childbearing’

Some take 1 Timothy 2:15 to refer to ‘the childbearing’, the birth of Christ promised in Genesis 3:15; others to women being brought safely through childbirth, or to a believing woman living out her salvation in the ordinary calling of motherhood. None of these readings treats childbearing as sinful.

The text does not explain why the mother’s time of uncleanness after the birth of a girl was twice as long as after a boy (12:2-5), and interpreters have offered many suggestions.