OPINION:
Body Shame
If you are going through a bereavement, one of the most agonising things you can hear is that the death was “God’s will”. It kind of makes you hate God, for why would God need to take a person you love, particularly someone in the prime of their lives? I think back to how horrific it was for my family, most especially my brother and sister-in-law, to lose a child at eight and a half months and deliver her stillborn. But God’s will is a powerful weapon used to shut down questions, grief, concerns, and hopes. God’s will has been used to justify misogyny, racism, slavery, holocausts and homophobia.
With referendum posters pushing affecting and demanding slogans and images in our faces, I can’t help wondering what lies beneath such inflamed emotionality. A core religious belief around conception is that God alone can give life; it is his gift. Hence the anxiety around any scientific encroachments or interventions that might decide or influence potential for life, be it IVF, surrogacy, cloning, stem cells; or the removal of the potential for life – be it through contraception or terminations. Within this domain of God’s, sex is only for procreation, never for fun or pleasure.