In the book of Vayikra, otherwise known as Leviticus, in parashah Tazria, the laws of childbirth and purification are given.
When a woman gives birth to a child, the delivery is traumatic on many levels. It is physically and emotionally taxing. There are many adjustments to the quick changes that are happening in her body. A lot of healing is needed. Energy must be recovered. Besides the trauma of the birth, she also has to deal with the new child. Fortunately, this baby energizes her with great joy.
There is also a spiritual price from having a baby. According to the Torah, she has to limit herself in other ways. She is considered to be ritually impure. She is prohibited from having sexual relations with her husband and she is barred from going into a house of prayer.
This ritual impurity is understood as being a state of her soul. There is some damage to her spirit resulting from the separation from the fetus. The physical change of no longer sharing her body with her unborn child causes spiritual impairment. A woman becomes somewhat disassociated from sanctity by the birth of a child.
She has become adversely spiritually wounded in the course of delivering the baby. While pregnant, her body has consisted of more than one life. This life within her has developed gradually and she has become accustomed to actually BEING more than one person. At birth, the separation is dramatic and sudden. That is traumatic physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
It is a transition on all these levels and more. The mother needs to get to know herself again and become a new person. She has to recover in many ways. At the same time, she is meeting and nursing a new life that is outside her body.
Why should parturition harm the mother’s soul, making her ritually impure? The answer is revealed within post-partum instructions to the mother.
One of the points made in the Torah is that the time for spiritual recovery is different for a boy child than for a girl child. The Torah rule is that the woman is ritually impure for 40 days after the birth of a son. She may not have marital relations for the first 7 of those days. The time is longer for a daughter. In that situation, the mother is considered ritually impure for 80 days and marital relations are prohibited for the first 14 days.
What is the meaning of this impurity? Most mothers will agree that she is not nearly as energetic at the culmination of a pregnancy. All systems are on “Whoa!” She needs time to recover and adjust. She is hurting.
She feels a loss. This loss is compensated by having a living baby. Certainly, this after birth transition in her life affects her soul. And the Torah instructs how she can recover spiritually from the experience.
There is also a confluence of physical and spiritual forces that explain the impurity differences between oppositely gendered offspring. A male fetus has only his own set of genes. No sperm will begin to be formed for 12-13 years. A female has all of her eggs in her at the time of birth. She will not produce any more in her life.
A son leaves the uterus with just himself. A daughter leaves with all her pre-formed human production potential. Though they are only half the DNA needed for new life later, these eggs are significant to the separation.
The mother is parting not just from her daughter. She is also losing all the ova. The mother’s body included the female child and thousands of eggs. She has been nurturing and supporting all these undeveloped lives. These eggs are multiple manifestations of how her genetic legacy can be passed onward to another generation.
Each ovum has a little tug on a potential soul. Each is readying to become a person. This potential is a spiritual reality.
Thus, for a daughter the loss is greater. Less for a son. Hence the difference in spiritual recovery times. There is no correlate in physical recovery times associated with child gender.
Health and Spirit by Dr. Jack Zoldan 