The enduring presence of the image of the Virgin Mary in art about abortion illuminates a crisis in representation. On the one hand, visual depictions of Mary in anti-abortion prayers, posters, and campaign images imply she wishes to protect the (normally fully developed) foetuses against elective abortions. These images tend to be colorful and soft, with archetypal postures of the Virgin praying or cradling infants in a clear attempt to stir emotions and legitimize the artist’s arguments against abortion on religious and moral grounds (see feature image above). The weaponization of the most prominent woman in Christianity against those potentially seeking abortions is powerful and should not be underestimated. On the other hand, artist-activists predominantly from some of the most restrictive Christian nations in terms of reproductive freedom have reclaimed Mary in recent years as a figure of autonomy and compassion for those facing unwanted or unviable pregnancies. By recontextualizing figurines and Marian iconography, modern contemporary artists have utilized the charged image of Mary to dispute the intellectual appropriation of the Annunciation story towards “pro-life” ideological and political ends.
For instance, Sylvia Lucero’s María Feminista/ Virgen Abortera (2019) and Rachel Fallon’s the judgement of clytemnestra & mary (inside) (2016, figure 2), depict the Virgin as an implicitly or explicitly powerful symbol of women’s contested control over their own bodies and futures. These works push back against the historic and ongoing use of biblical symbols of women and the feminine to shape legal views of women that essentialize women’s role and status as reproductive vessels, or what Lucinda Peach has referred to as “fetal containers.”1
Scholar Marina Warner describes Mary and her example in Catholic countries as an “instrument of a dynamic argument from the Catholic Church about the structure of society, presented as a God-given code.”2 She elaborates that Mary’s virginity underlines the pollution of intercourse, as her freedom from birthing pain (which is in itself framed as a reflection of her virtue) focuses an exaggerated attention on the mechanics and physicality of her reproductive organs. Meanwhile, the Church’s teaching on contraception and abortion can exacerbate the terrors of sex and childbirth by maintaining pregnancy as a constant and very real danger. Ultimately, this reinforces the believer’s need for reassurance and the Church’s authority and power in turn.
In modern evangelical circles, Mary has been revered as “Our Lady of the unborn.” “Abortion regret” or “abortion healing” groups such as Lumina have merged their beliefs with their own adverse experiences. The ministry is run by women who regret their own abortions and who now feel the urge to “save” other women from the same experience by striving to make abortion illegal. Lumina is representative of many Christian post-abortion ministries in the U.S. that promote what Judith Samson describes as a “specific medicalization” of the political discussion on abortion.3
The Virgin Mary plays a crucial role in these ministries because many Catholic anti-abortion activists have a deep Marian piety. The groups make pilgrimages and pray to icons of the Virgin, who is both the ideal mother (in this case one who would not get an abortion) and the merciful intercessor and forgiver of the murderous sin these women feel they have committed. It is, of course, vitally important that support is available for all those who have had an abortion—no matter how they feel about it subsequently. However, the shaming nature of such ministries imitate other punitive practices associated with women in particular Christian traditions. For example, the symbol of Eve has also played a social role since medieval times in explaining woman’s pain in childbirth as punishment for her sin in the garden, as found in Genesis 3:16: “Unto the woman he [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” The passage was one of the main justifications for the Catholic Church not to endorse pain relief in childbirth until the 1950s.
Other precedents in Christian scholarship are just as unforgiving of the right to abortion/reproductive management. St. Augustine notably doubted the validity of women having power over their own fertility and procreation, arguing that “woman is the instrument of God’s creativity,” not “the creatoress [sic] of her own offspring.” Later in the 5th century, John Chrysostom chimed in with vigorous opposition to contraception. He heatedly exhorted men that, through the use of contraception, a “[w]oman, (who is) made for reproduction, becomes, because of you, a tool of murder.”4
As long as the Christian pro-life view is one in which motherhood is a state of being or even the primary purpose of a woman’s life, and not just a social role or relationship, those who are pro-choice may be said to reject compulsory motherhood and therefore negate their own “primary purpose.”5 Mary can, thus, be held up as an example of a woman who embodies purity, passivity, and submissiveness.She is revered not only because she is the mother of Jesus Christ, the son of God, but also because of the non-sexual and divine nature of her conception of Jesus. This means that, drawing from Peach again, ultimately the primary Christian role model for women forgoes sexual pleasure, physical prowess, and economic and intellectual power to become a “mother” for her “divine” son.
The contradictions in this line of thinking and the confused connotations of using this example to promote childbirth at all costs may be evident to the majority of readers. It is important, however, to remind ourselves of the reference points present in the work of the following contemporary artists as they create work that does not simply reject Mary and all the meaning that has been ascribed to her, but instead reclaims her image as their own.
In 1974, Pope Paul VI wrote that Mary should not only be considered “as a mother exclusively concerned with her own divine Son, but rather as a woman whose action helped to strengthen the apostolic community’s faith in Christ.” His invocation of Mary’s “action” might suggest that she is a person to whom more agency should be ascribed in the telling of her story than is typically afforded. This idea is a fruitful one for feminist scholars, as is its implication: that some historical and contemporary views of her are limited and reductive. Of course, as Marina Warner points out in Alone of All Her Sex, the Vatican cannot simply strip away a veil and reveal Mary’s metamorphosis into the New Woman without dredging up centuries of prejudice.Yet this notion of recontextualizing Mary, of giving new breath to the meaning/s of her image when we see it used differently or perhaps “inappropriately,” speaks deeply to our outlooks and upbringings and therefore is central to the impact of the artworks that engage with her.
Consider Irish multimedia artist Rachel Fallon, who deals with themes of protection and defense in the domestic realm and who has created many works on the topic of motherhood and women’s relationships to society. Her art encompasses sculpture, drawing, photography, and performance and is firmly rooted in processes of making. As well as an individual practitioner, she is known for her collaborations with Irish and international artists and collectives, including Artists’ Campaign to Repeal the Eighth Amendment, Desperate Artwives, Feminist Parasite Institution, Grrrl Zine Fair, and The Tellurometer Project. In Ireland during Fallon’s time, abortion was widely debated, leading up to the 2018 passage of the Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy Act, allowing abortion up to 12 weeks. One example of her work on women’s reproductive experience, Mother Medal (2018, figure 3), reflects on Pronatalist regimes that reward women for high numbers of births. While this work draws on famous historical examples of pronatalist incentives, the fact that, in recent times, prominent right-wing influencers and political figures have taken to using similar rhetorics of reproduction and cultural preservation will not escape the reader.
In The Judgement of Clytemnestra Fallon uses the vessel motif literally. The piece consists of a hollow figurine of a woman holding an infant. In a companion piece, Mary (inside) (Figure 4), the figurine’s face is displayed alongside the figurine in a separate case. The fragment is cushioned in a somewhat embryonic twist of pink fabric. Fallon evokes two different female figures from history and myth in this work. The first, Clytemnestra, was the wife of King Agamemnon in Ancient Greek mythology. She is said to have taken a lover and killed her husband in revenge for the sacrifice of her daughter. This story is of course utterly opposed to narratives surrounding the Virgin, begging the question of what the significance of bringing such different characters together might be. Clytemnestra may have been chosen as representative of the destructive powers of women akin to Mary’s more usual counterparts Eve, or Pandora. The queen incarnates the classical goddess archetype in human form, encompassing the duality of nurture and destruction.
By contrast, Mary is only afforded generative powers in her narrative. She is not permitted to destroy or undo, only nurture and grow. In this particular respect, her use as a symbol against abortion becomes starkly clear. The placement of her fragmented face on the foetus-like material hints at the explicit identification of “woman” with her real or potential foetus. The demure, placid face stands in for the “whole” identity of the figure. The artist’s placement hints not only at the narrative of a fictive, faceless, and unrepresented cohort of unborn children, but also at the selective concern for women/childbearing people when it comes to their reproductive decisions and opportunities. Notably, the “Clytemnestra” figurine is left with her child intact but without the means to see or to speak. She is a vessel, ready to be filled with whatever the viewer decides to project onto her.
Artist Sylvia Lucero is also from a predominantly Catholic country: Argentina. As with many other Latin American countries such as Mexico and Columbia, Argentinian women lived with extremely restricted access to terminations beyond “the most extreme circumstances” up until 2020. Amid wide scale campaigning for reproductive justice and anti-femicide marches, Lucero took a unifying symbol of resistance—the green scarf—and adorned a large scale figurine of the Virgin with it to make María Feminista, later dubbed Virgen Abortera (2019). The piece, part of a wider series named Subversiones, took a ubiquitous household icon and harnessed her traditional protective properties in defense of women activists.In Lucero’s work, the Virgin is given a fresh intercessory purpose: advocating for women’s choices and autonomy over their own bodies in the face of state and gendered violence.
The association of Mary with such causes, however, prompted abrupt backlash from anti-civil rights groups such as the Christian Democratic Party, and the piece was censored and removed. Lucero’s piece consciously speaks to the need for a Mary who represents the struggle and interests of ordinary people rather than being purely a loaded symbol of Church/State interests. The oversized figurine, commonly found in any home shrine or altarista, repurposes the intimate protective and intermedial powers of the object and directs it toward the collective, communal cause as an act of both empowerment and of bold subversion of Argentine propriety.
In discourse surrounding religion and reproduction, Mary is all too often dichotomized either as a submissive vessel who neither chose nor rejected motherhood or as the ultimate mother who enthusiastically took on the role of mother and would never dream of abortion or contraception. But she is surely more complex than this—just as the nuance on the different sides of the dialogue and disagreements around abortion are complex. As Womanist Theologian Diana Hayes asserts, Mary’s choice in the annunciation was not to “be used merely as a passive, empty vessel, but a yes to empowerment, challenging the status quo.”6 Whether one agrees with Hayes’s reading or not, her statements emphasize that there is no singular or fixed way to “read” Mary. Her character, reception, and continued significance have been and continue to be highly personal to those who know her. To assert that Mary would, or could, emphatically hold a position on any contemporary social issue is patently illogical.
The visual arts can have an immediate and profound value in socially charged debates, communicating the emotions and outlooks of those who go unheard or unvalued in the political, religious, and social minefield that has become access to reproductive healthcare. The most generous view of Mary in the campaign images and organizations discussed, as well as in the works by contemporary artist-activists, is as a figure of intercession, not persecution. Although she has often been the face of movements intended to suppress women’s reproductive freedom, the Mary depicted by these instead protects and intervenes on behalf of all women, including those who need or want abortions.
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Endnotes
- Lucinda J. Peach, “From Spiritual Descriptions to Legal Prescriptions: Religious Imagery of Woman as Fetal Container in the Law,” Journal of Law and Religion 10, no. 1 (2015): 73–93.
- Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Oxford University Press, 2016), 344.
- Judith Samson, “The Scars of the Madonna: The Struggle Over Abortion in the Example of an American Post-Abortion Pilgrimage to Mary,” Journal of Ritual Studies 28, no. 2 (2014): 37–49.
- Saint John Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the First Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians: Hom. 1-24. Pt. 2. Hom. 25-44 (1839).
- Pam Lowe and Sarah-Jane Page, “‘On The Wet Side Of The Womb’: The Construction of ‘Mothers’ in Anti-Abortion Activism In England And Wales,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 26, no. 2 (2018): 165–80.
- Diana L Hayes, Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made: A Womanist Theology (Fortress, 2011), 111.
Maryanne Saunders