From Fr. Cole’s article titled, “Mary’s Virginity, Theology of the Body, and St. Thomas Aquinas”
Birth is an act of the child and of the mother, an interpersonal event of welcoming the newborn in the way of love. In North America, normal childbirth has suffered from the domination of medicine, replacing nature with technology. Birth and reproduction are seen in terms of production. Life and babies are delivered during labor. Sometimes, physicians who are in a hurry administer hormones to speed up powerful contractions so that the baby is pushed along the birth canal faster than the cervix can dilate, a process which requires forceps to extract the baby. This routine intervention has led to the use of anesthesia and, afterwards, to postpartum distress.
In contrast, giving birth is a natural and normal act for a healthy mother and child. It is not an illness to be treated. Birth is an act of the infant and the mother, assisted by the cooperative art of midwifery or obstetrics when needed. Birth has its own onset and duration. Thus, there is a great need for privacy so that the woman may feel unobserved and free to relax so that hormonal changes will proceed normally.
When the baby is born, he is in a quiet alert state; there is also usually a cry of joy from the mother. Through the first eye-to-eye encounter of mother and child, the expressive power of the human face provides welcoming affirmation which the child receives anew through breast feeding. Breastfeeding is the norm that ensures good mothering and optimum development of the child and hence a serious moral obligation of mothers. This goes against the thought of radical feminists who claim that it is demeaning to have a mother stay at home with child.
The dependency of infants, children, and men upon women is most evident: a basic human need for physical, emotional and interpersonal love. Feeding and loving always have been associated with mothers and women. Being nourished physically and emotionally always strengthens the human person. This communion of mother and child at the breast fosters a bond that forms the child’s capacity for love and moral action. Again, this is the norm of nature, to ensure good mothering and optimum development of the child. Remembering that giving birth, with the subsequent act of breastfeeding, was both a supernatural and natural act requiring Mary’s cooperation, it follows that Mary’s fulfillment of this role brought her many graces because her vocation was to foster maternal-infant communication and communion.
Mother’s milk is superior milk, and nursing yields emotional and spiritual benefits which allow the newborn and mother to form an unbreakable bond. Unlike other mammals, a face-to-face relationship occurs during human nursing; the baby can see about nine inches, just enough to see his mother’s face. Even after half an hour, mothers can identify their own infant by smell alone. And after two days, infants can distinguish the fragrance of their own mother’s breast. These experiences would have occurred between Mary and her Son.
The first suckling is a milk called colostrums, which has enormous immunological properties for developing the proper intestinal microbial flora, crucial for the baby’s digestive adaptability. When this milk declines after a week, then a different kind of milking takes place, releasing two hormones in the mother called oxytocin (increasing maternal tenderness for the infant) and prolactin (regulating the “supply and demand” for the baby’s daily differing needs). One property of foremilk is to quench the baby’s thirst. There is also hindmilk which is richer. Different milks prevent excessive weight gain in the baby. These naturally regulated and different kinds of milk are necessary not only for the baby but also for an ovulation in the mother. A mother’s milk tastes sweet and produces a chemical called casmorphin, a chemical resulting in the bliss seen in a suckling infant. Finally, mother’s milk also has an anti-diarrhea benefit that prevents dehydration of infants when ill.32 It is easy to understand why artists have portrayed Mary suckling her infant, and theologians have seen this as a metaphor for the Church feeding her members.
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