After too many hours of labor and multiple complications, I finally heard the most beautiful sound of my newborn boy’s cries for the first time. After the doctor, my husband was the first to hold our son, as I was sewn back together post cesarean section. As many new mothers, my heart was exploding with worship and gratitude over the gift of a safe delivery and healthy child. Yet there was a thought that I have not been able to escape from that day on: It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

When Eve, the Mother of All Living, was cursed as a result of sin in Genesis 3, God said to her:

“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.”

Biological mothers everywhere know a version of this pain, even if they were spared some of it through medication. Labor hurts. Not to mention, hundreds of thousands of women around the globe still die every year in childbirth. Physically bringing a baby into the world involves pain. We know this. Yet while “pain in childbearing” is not less than labor pains and life-threatening births, it is more than that.

Every woman, young or old, biological mother or not, experiences the curse of pain in childbearing.

Infertility. Miscarriage. Debilitating pregnancy symptoms. Complications during pregnancy. Contractions. Painful breastfeeding efforts. Failed adoptions. Menstrual pain. Menopausal pain. Disobedient toddlers. Wayward teenage and adult children. These examples just scratch the surface of the sufferings of women that can be categorized as “pain in childbearing.”

When we experience this pain in childbearing (and if you’re a woman, you have and you will), what do we do with it? Let’s allow the grief to drive us to these truths:

1) It’s not supposed to be this way.

While my unplanned c-section was a very minor suffering compared to others, my sense of it being somehow “wrong” was not unfounded. God designed women to be able to deliver children in a particular way. Because of the fall, sometimes women’s bodies don’t work the way they should. Mine didn’t, and that’s something to be grieved.

It is not only okay to acknowledge when things aren’t the way they should be– it is good and right. Doing so orients us to the beauty of God’s original design and to the hideous brokenness that sin has wrought. When we experience pain in childbearing, we ought to remember the curse and grieve the sin that caused it.

2) Our pain points us to Christ, the serpent-crusher.

The good news is that the story doesn’t end with grief. In this very same passage of Genesis 3, we see what scholars call the protoevangelium– the first gospel proclamation. Just before the curse of the woman we see it in the curse of the serpent:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”

In God’s kindness, though it is through much pain, women do still bear children. More than that, we see in this curse a promise that one day a woman would have an offspring that would bruise (in other translations, crush) the head of the serpent. The Christian’s New Covenant lens allows us to see that this woman was Mary, daughter of Eve, who brought forth Jesus, the Serpent-Crusher himself, through much pain in her childbearing.

Our pain in childbearing is tied to the gospel. As we grieve things not being the way they are supposed to be, we can remember the hope that Jesus gives. Even in the moment of cursing it was promised that he, the seed of the woman, would come to deliver us. He has come, and he will come again.

3) It is worth it.

This is something mothers hear and say often, rightly so. But it’s not only worth it for the woman who successfully conceives and delivers a healthy baby. It’s not only worth it for the mom who is fortunate enough to see all her grown children happy, healthy, and walking with the Lord. We must believe the suffering is worth it for the mom who lost her baby in the third trimester. We must believe the suffering is worth it for the woman who always desperately wanted to be an earthly mother but was never married as she wished, or was infertile, or who had too many miscarriages for her heart to handle. We must believe the suffering is worth it because Christ is our prize.

While in our suffering we may not get clear answers to our “why” questions in this life, we can trust that God has good purposes for us in it. As Paul says in Romans 5, “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.” Our suffering, whether we get the earthly blessing of a healthy, God-fearing child or not, is never wasted.

Pain in childbearing will continue to be felt by all women everywhere until the Kingdom comes. Let’s grieve sin when this pain comes, put our hope in Christ, and remember that for the believer, no suffering is ever wasted.