Childbirth again

In The Christian Future , Rosenstock-Huessy again makes some passing comments about childbirth. He is talking about the character of suburban life, its ethnic and economic uniformity, its placid and indifferent external peacefulness that hides, he claims, desperate inner conflicts. For Rosenstock-Huessy, the whole situation is summarized by the fact that the suburb excludes experience of death and resurrection. Sickness and death are “not allowed to happy visibly in a suburb. Even the word ‘death’ is almost taboo.” At the other end of life, “Children are not born in suburbs but in maternity wards.” He asks, “How can a man respond to emergencies of war or peace with the full depth of heroism if he has not quaked in the presence of shattering travail, when woman wages her corresponding fight against death?” In the time he was writing, “this tremendous revolution of the soul when in blood and agony the fruit of love enters the world, modern husbands are excluded by the science of medicine. But where else do we ever experience the law of creation?”