This is one in a series from Jaques-Benigne Bossuet’s Elevations on the Mysteries, and specifically the Fifth Day. There is more here on the Bossuet Project.
The Lord said to this woman: I will multiply your calamities and your births; you will give birth in pain. Fertility is the glory of women; it is there that God puts his torment: it is only at the risk of her life that she is fertile. This torture is not peculiar to women; the human race is completely cursed from conception and birth, confusion and pain, and on all sides surrounded by torment and death. The child can not be born without putting his mother in danger; neither can the husband become a father without risking the most precious half of his life. Eve is unhappy and cursed of all her sex whose children are so often murderers; she was made to be to man a sweet companion, his consolation, and to make the sweetness of his life; she was proud of this goal, but God mixed in subjection, and it changed this sweet superiority he had first given to man into a bitter domination. He was superior by reason, he becomes a severe master by temper; his jealousy makes him a tyrant: the woman is subject to this fury, and in more than half the earth, women are in a kind of slavery. This hard empire of husbands and this yoke to which the woman is subjected is an effect of sin. Weddings are as often a torture as a sweet liaison; and one is a hard cross to the other, and a torment of which they cannot be delivered from: united and separated, we torment each other. In the spiritual sense, they are born only with difficulty; all the productions of the spirit cost him; worries shorten our days: everything that is desirable is laborious.
By the redemption of the human race Eve’s torment changes into grace. His first punishment made his fertility perilous; but grace, as says St. Paul, makes that she is saved by the production of children. If her life is there exposed, her salvation is assured, provided that she is faithful to what she is asked to be, that is to say that she remains in the conjugal faith, in a chaste love of her husband, in sanctification and piety, as natural to her sex; banning the vanities of adornment and all softness, by sobriety, moderation and temperance, as the same Saint Paul adds.
Positive Infinity 