What The Annunciation Teaches Us About Lesbian Pregnancy

Thoughts from a would-be parent about co-creation, pleasure, gender complementarianism, and the Magnificat on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception

Since I began trying to get pregnant a few months ago, many of my friends have lightheartedly quipped that I am going to have an immaculate conception. I always giggle politely about what they are mischievously referencing – gestating a baby without having sex with a man. Comparing my experience to Mary’s conception actually resonates a lot with me, but at a level beyond this tongue-in-cheek attempt at transgression. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates a truth universal to all pregnancies – they are inherently acts of co-creation with God.

Humankind’s role in Creation is a treasured tenet of the Catholic Church. Almost a thousand years ago Doctor of the Church St. Hildegard von Bingen perhaps put it best in her writing, in which she envisions God saying “I have been moved by the form of humankind, I have kissed it, grounded it in faithful relationship – thus I have exalted humankind with the vocation of creation, I call humankind to the same norm.” The Catechism continues to endorse this, affirming that God empowers us “to be intelligent and free causes in order to complete the work of creation, to perfect its harmony for their own good and that of their neighbors. [… We] can also enter deliberately into the divine plan by [our] actions, [our] prayers, and [our] sufferings. They [we] fully become “God’s fellow workers” and co-workers for [God’s] kingdom.” God asks us to engage participatively in life, moving it, shaking it, using discernment and gifts to better Creation and support its flourishing – in big ways and small.

In Luke, the Annunciation is described in length as a dialogue between Mary of Nazareth and Gabriel, God’s angel. The agreement to mother the Son of God is a process – Gabriel greets Mary, Mary expresses her bewilderment, Gabriel proposes God’s wild plan, Mary voices some misgivings, and Gabriel provides some more detail before Mary ultimately green lights this project. This generative exchange leading to pregnancy demonstrates the principle of co-creation in action.

Mary and God shape and arrive at conception and parenthood together, although this can be obscured by the translation of Luke 1:28 found in the New American Bible (Revised Edition), which is the foundation of the US lectionary. The NABRE writes Mary’s concluding words after the conversation with Gabriel as “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” The selection of the word “handmaid” emphasizes Mary’s low status, and the idea that something is about to be “done to her” conveys at best acquiescence. Contrast this with the translation of the New Revised Standard Version (Catholic Edition), which records Mary’s words as “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Mary asserts her sovereignty and personhood alongside her relationship with God, and her role as “servant” places her in the tradition of the Bible’s other disciples and holy people, indeed even Jesus himself. In declaring “let it be with me according to your word”, Mary invites the work of God into her life, becoming its steward and its second parent.

I always imagine the Annunciation happening at night, a time that symbolizes mystery, generativity, and possibility. Mary doesn’t simply wake up one day with the Holy Spirit creating a baby inside of her. In the middle of darkness she dances with God, wholly participating in making something new.

All gestating parents take part in this dance – be it a waltz, a two-step, a bachata, a tango. They eat voraciously, they stash money away, they enlist the support of family and friends, they listen to the wisdom of others who have birthed and raised children, they prepare a place for the baby in their homes. With the exceptions of those who do not know and those who cannot accept they are pregnant, no one just lies back and waits for the baby to happen. A baby is dreamed and built into being; parents shepherd and cultivate God’s gift of new life.

This is more evident for those who become parents through Assisted Reproductive Technology, which I myself rely on as a lesbian monogamously partnered with a same-sex spouse. With ART, the element of intentionality is crystal clear – I am more than “open to life”, as Catholic teaching says a married woman should be, I am actively seeking it. My wife and I decided we would try to start our family using intrauterine insemination (usually referred to as IUI), a method less expensive and invasive than IVF but still laborious. To attempt to get pregnant, we had to research and select a reliable fertility clinic, immerse ourselves in the fraught process of selecting an anonymous sperm donor, save up thousands of dollars to pay for the sperm and the medical procedures (no small feat for millennials living in New York City), undergo genetic testing and legal counseling, and don’t even get me started about all the early morning blood tests and ultrasounds that are required each month to identify the optimal insemination date. This baby is dearly, dearly wanted, and yet its creation is not completely under our control – there is an element of chance in each IUI cycle; it’s in God’s hands.

The availability of Assisted Reproductive Technology will likely be at increased risk in 2025, as part of an unchecked Republican regime’s broader attack on forms of bodily autonomy such as transgender healthcare and abortion. It is forever strange to me how the ideal of religious freedom is used to twist and restrict people’s ability to co-create their lives with God – whether it be a trans person enfleshing their gender, a would-be parent protecting their health, or a person not called to parenthood taking action to remain faithful to their true vocations.

Interestingly, the Catholic Church does not explicitly disprove of the use of IUI for married heterosexual couples, provided that sperm is obtained through intercourse and then collected for later insemination. My friend Lauren Barbato, previously executive director of the progressive Catholic social justice organization Call To Action, discussed this peculiarity with Bekah McNeel for a Sojourners article on the Pope’s call for a ban on surrogacy earlier this year. In Lauren’s view, many of the Church’s decrees on reproductive issues are “based on a desire to preserve a certain kind of family and regulate sex within that family structure”. This makes a lot of sense to me, because the idea that a husband isn’t supposed to masturbate even within the greater context of impregnating his wife otherwise seems pretty extreme. If it becomes permissible for sex and procreation to be decoupled, the Church will be forced to reckon with complex questions about what sex is and what sex is for. But the way I see it, sex and procreation were fundamentally decoupled by the Annunciation – God and Mary did not have sex, in a way Jesus was the first IUI baby.

I heard Sr. Jeannine Gramick, co-founder of New Ways Ministry, talk to Dignity Philadelphia as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations in May 2023. One of her comments that really stayed with me was her hope that the Church would move away from a theology of procreation and toward a theology of pleasure. The idea of sex being about pleasure really wigs the Church out, but at the same time the seeds of a theology of pleasure are already germinating – Jesuits have the perspective that God’s desires are present in our deepest desires, Franciscans understand a key task of life as living more authentically within oneself. Sex is a part of life, life encompasses sex – sooner or later, Catholic understanding will evolve to recognize that pleasure and authenticity in sex is part of God’s plan.

If sex can be about pleasure, that really takes a hammer to the idea that gay and bisexual people have sexualities that are “intrinsically disordered”, to use the language of the infamous 1975 Papal document Persona humana. Add that onto the possibility of procreation without sex, and arguments against gay parenthood and gay marriage start to crumble. The major leg they would still have to stand on is gender complementarianism, which I’ll get to shortly.

Embracing my sexual desires and affirming my sexual orientation has been a foundational aspect of co-creating my life with God. Living and loving authentically is an honoring of the way God created me - “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” I have been faithful to that despite the social pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the economic reality of decreased household earning potential in a family headed by a lesbian couple, the tenuous protections of marriage and parenthood in the American legal system, and the utter lack of guidance and often open hostility of the Catholic Church. Through this faith, God has helped me to cultivate so many gifts – a strong and loving marriage with a spouse who grows with me and makes me happy, friendships with other lesbian and queer women and nonbinary people where we can mutually share the joys and sorrows of our shared road, community and solidarity with gay and queer men and trans people as well as many others whose perspectives and struggles are connected to my own. It is only through this faith that I could hope to experience perhaps the greatest gift of all – together with my wife, becoming healthy, capable mothers to a baby that joins our family.

Back to gender complementarianism, which rests largely on this idea of the Marian and Petrine principles, ie: men are active leaders and women are passive supporters. In the United States, the Immaculate Conception has become associated with the Church’s crusade against abortion. This is illustrated by the very fact that when we talk about the Immaculate Conception we are usually referring to the Annunciation and the miracle of the virgin birth; dogmatically the term Immaculate Conception actually refers to the Church teaching that Mary and Jesus were both conceived without original sin. The annual March For Life opens with a prayer vigil at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a month or so after people are revved up by Respect Life initiatives in their local parishes and communities during Advent. The Church is distracted by the secular paradigm of “choice” in its rhetoric against abortion. It seeks to either protect women it sees as lacking choice, preyed upon by an unscrupulous medical industrial complex or misled by worldly concerns like income or careers, or chastise women and prevent them from exercising choice, rejecting motherhood for what it sees as invalid reasons. The fundamental reason drifting into the choice paradigm is possible is because it reinforces the Church’s positioning of women into passive, “Marian” roles.

Every Catholic hears the Annunciation as part of the Lectionary, but unless they seek it they may never come across the Magnificat, which occurs a few verses later in Lk 1:46-55. The Magnificat, which Mary sings when her cousin Elizabeth discovers her pregnancy, is one of if not the most radical parts of the Bible. I’m enclosing the NRSVCE translation below with a small light edit from me:

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and Sarah and to their descendants forever.

The Magnificat is typically described as Mary’s song of praise, but to me the words sound more like prophecy. She boldly declares that her soul magnifies the Lord, and indeed through her gestation and mothering God is magnified, we encounter God more profoundly and clearly through her example and through the life of Jesus. Unlike the false narrative of the excruciatingly patronizing Christmas song “Mary Did You Know?”, Mary understood the shattering blessing of the work she was doing with God and foresaw the mark it would forever leave on history. The Magnificat indelibly reveals Mary as a leader, gender complementarianism be damned. These are not the words of a guileless, submissive vessel. This is the roar of an adolescent girl ready to take her part in fulfilling a new world order.

This is what I honor on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception – the magnificent overhaul of you and God making everything new. Allowing God into the upending of social order, God thrusting you into reconsideration of all you think you know. God biting us in the places where we are stagnant and complacent. In the places where we are terrified and hopeless, God promising us once again the Kingdom that is already here, and is yet to come. Amen.