Unborn Bodies: Resurrection and Reproductive Agency tracks the painful paths, disentangles the religio-cultural thickets, and tackles theological thorny issues of women’s experiences with reproductive agency and endings. Maggi Kamitsuka offers a refreshing and relevant critical and constructive theological reflection about interrelated doctrines of God and the resurrection, particularly for women who “stand waiting with their jars of myrrh” (3) and who “understand that difficult reproductive decision-making is the God-given load they carry in a fallen world” (8). In this essay about this long-needed interdisciplinary book, I trace major contours and raise some significant implications as well as salient questions about Kamitsuka’s argument, especially regarding its eschatology, anthropology, and pneumatology, from feminist and womanist perspectives.

Eschatology

Rigorous and robust feminist and womanist theologies problematize and produce more just alternatives to theologically gendered, racialized, sexualized, ableist, and other elitist and supremacist scripts, which are normalized and weaponized against women and marginalized groups in the church and society. In this same spirit, Kamitsuka surveys and analyzes Christian tradition from early through medieval, Reformation, modern, and contemporary eras to show that tradition denies salvific possibilities for multiple types of unborn bodies. Yet women “demand their resurrections” (34). Kamitsuka painstakingly sifts this troublesome history (chapter 2) to recover all too few glimpses of an empowering counternarrative in which women reclaimed their reproductive agency either to reject motherhood in pursuit of religious goals (sometimes via miraculous abortions 53–54) or to accept “sacramental strictures, while still attempting to bend the rules and get their child a place in heaven” (39). These fragments of women’s counterstories to deeply entrenched and seemingly intransigent kyriarchal theology and tradition, mainly in a Westcentric context, are lamented as much as women’s and children’s bodies fragmented by reproductive endings. What other counternarratives might emerge from taking a global perspective of Christian traditions and/or of Christian and interreligious relations?

Kamitsuka’s own contribution to this counternarrative develops a “nontoxic eschatology” (5) that disrupts a “family separation policy” and its harmful binary between saved infants in heaven with damned mothers in hell (in the case of abortion) or saved mothers in heaven with unbaptized children elsewhere (in the case of miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths) (6, 20–26)—on the limbo-edge of hell or edged out of liturgical and burial practices altogether, until recently (41–42). Instead, Kamitsuka embraces “the creative tension between the here and now and the afterlife” in order to “sustain an embodied sense of self” (32). Drawing on powerful Pauline metaphors of sowing and growing grain (1 Corinthians 15:37), Kamitsuka reimagines bodily resurrection as “divinely fructified sprouting” (60). In contrast to soul-body hierarchical dualism in Christian tradition, which fed patriarchal and ascetic ideologies (chapter 3) and which fueled Westcentric colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and racism as M. Shawn Copeland’s work shows,1 Kamitsuka introduces and elaborates a materialist model of resurrection, grounded in “Christianity’s root metaphor for resurrection: seed” or more aptly this seed’s postmortem budding into spiritual bodies (76, 84–85). Resurrection does not take place immediately but rather takes time: “Spiritual bodies germinate from these seeds into a bloom of resurrection. In time these bodies take their place in the heavenly procession. . . . Emergence is a process” (80, 83).

Kamitsuka’s constructive eschatology can be critically situated and illuminatively interpreted in relation to feminist and womanist eschatologies. As Kamitsuka briefly notes (26, 30–31), these theologies—illustrated in my view by the late Catholic feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether2—criticize any postponed individualized or otherworldly eschatological expectations and instead embrace a this-worldly view of justice and flourishing for all life, including the Earth. Exemplified by Catholic Brazilian ecofeminist Ivone Gebara, the late Cuban American mujerista theologian and ethicist Ada María Isasi-Díaz, and African American womanist M. Shawn Copeland,3 these theologies diversify and expand the option for the poor in liberation theologies to interrelate women’s option for themselves in solidarity with others and in active hope for realizing a new future, specifically an antipatriarchal, antiracist, anti-imperial, and decolonial more just alternative future. On my reading, feminist and womanist eschatologies spring from, among other scriptural texts, humanity’s and creation’s simultaneous cry for fulfillment in the present and in the longed-for future, which Paul paralleled with maternal labor (Romans 8:22–25). While Kamitsuka claims that her constructive eschatology “will not erase but will deepen corporeal interdependence” (109), a materialist model of resurrection in spiritual bodies still reads in my view of the book’s argument in an individualist and decontextualized way. How is embodied resurrection hope interconnected with our intertwined relationality with society and the Earth as envisioned by feminist and womanist eschatologies? How will spiritual bodies create a more just and justice-seeking body politic that suffers much intersectional injustice and also heal the body of the Earth degraded by anthropogenic climate change?

Anthropology

Women who face different reproductive endings are regularly typecasted in morally disparaged and stigmatized subjectivities, which Kamitsuka identifies as murderer, victim-sinner, or inconvenient mourner (chapter 1). On my reading, each subjectivity or identity role and its prescribed norms and behaviors injure women on multiple levels: emphasize their sin, condemn them to various allegedly healing practices, and delegitimize their unmet pastoral needs. Even rights-bearing subjectivity leads to damaging theo-political and social surveillance, because this role and its norms police women in between a rock and a hard place, as Kamitsuka observes, in between pro-life birth rights versus pro-choice body rights. These subjectivities spiritually and morally—and I would add theologically—wound women by misrepresenting or undermining their vastly complex reproductive lives, experiences, and decisions.

Human dignity lies, for Kamitsuka, in “God-given eschatological destiny” (123). As demonstrated in my recent essay on relational anthropologies,4 feminist and womanist theological anthropologies concur with Kamitsuka that the imago Dei is a performed act that ultimately awaits and reaches eschatological fulfillment. In my view, these anthropologies, including Kamitsuka’s proposal, offer a promising potent theological leverage point from which to critically engage with the Roman Catholic Vatican’s statements that repeatedly reduce women’s dignity to maternity and reinforce gender complementarity as well as heterosexual difference.

Catholic magisterial theologies from John Paul II’s Letter to Women in 1995 to Benedict XVI’s Letter to Bishops in 2004 articulate equal human dignity for women but reassert and reinforce heteronormative gender complementarity that restricts women’s humanity and religio-political agency as well as activism.5 These papal letters routinely advocate for gender equality, that is, for women’s social, economic, and political rights, by appealing on theological grounds to women’s equal creation in the image of God or to Trinitarian relations as a model of and for egalitarian human relations. However, both letters ultimately undermine that equality by proposing a biophysicalist anthropology. Papal anthropologies characterize women on the physical, psychological, and ontological grounds of their biological and social capacity for self-gift, i.e., for their reproductive and maternal “genius.” Resembling romantic or cultural feminism, this bioessentialist and determinist view of women’s subjectivity and agency based on their maternal nature and its sociopolitical implications reduces women to their maternal body and also negates the plurality of their embodied experiences of race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability shaped by varied sociocultural and historical contexts.

In the 2024 Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s declaration on human dignity Dignitas Infinita,6 Pope Francis participates in a similar theological doublespeak. Published nearly thirty years after John Paul’s Letter and nineteen years after John Paul’s death, the declaration affirms intrinsic, inalienable, and inviolable human dignity and rights (paras. 1–2, 11, 15, 22–23) in the context of global economic inequalities, eco-crises, war, and multiple kinds of violence—poverty, injustices against immigrants and people living with disabilities, human trafficking, sexual abuse, gender-based violence, and digital or online violence (part 4). Rooted in biblical, theological, and political perspectives on human rights based on equal creation in the image of God in Christ, which grows via the Spirit toward communion with God (paras. 11–22), the declaration promotes “the dignity of every human person, regardless of their physical, mental, cultural, social, and religious characteristics” (para. 66). Nonetheless, the declaration’s affirmation of such ontological human dignity and rights (para. 7) contrasts sharply with and contradicts its own disregard for such rights, especially women’s and LGBTQ+ rights in its sections on abortion (para. 47), gender (paras. 55–59), and sex (para. 60). Ontological rights and equal dignity are replaced in the sections with ontological differences and inequality. These sections, respectively, erase women’s and pregnant people’s rights to conscience-based moral agency and decision-making amid diverse challenging contexts and situations and degrade LGBTQ+ and nonbinary people’s complex humanity. For example, the declaration claims that “only by acknowledging and accepting this [gender and sexual] difference in reciprocity can each person fully discover themselves, their dignity, and their identity” (para. 59). Such statements reinforce heteronormative gender complementarity and sexual difference as divinely ordained, biologically given static gifts that correspond with different and unequal (not at all reciprocal) norms, roles, and capacities for people in the church and society. Such statements also bar women and transgender, nonbinary, and gender-questioning, queer, and diverse people from exploring their mind-soul-body identities—which as the declaration itself states “unfolds and manifests itself, as it does also through the network of human relationships” (para. 60)—beyond sex and procreation.

Feminist and womanist theological anthropologies emphasize narrative and story more generally to understand this unfolding process of identity and to effect a turn toward a more just relational personhood and politics.7 In contrast to the above predominant patriarchal religio-political scripts and norms for women as childbearers and women’s jeopardized humanity and soteriology as a result of their nonchildbearing or their queer, transgender, or nonbinary identity, Kamitsuka proposes rebuilding women’s bodied selves (in communities of support) after reproductive loss and reimagining their futures (for women, the unborn, and their communities) within a wider “matrix of life” (27–32). Kamitsuka rethinks divine power and human identity as the fertile theological soil for such rebuilding to take place.

God enables, in Kamitsuka’s highly original and imaginative constructive theology, all “creaturely resurrection” (79), even of unborn bodies, when emergence metaphysics is innovatively combined with theological anthropology (chapter 4). “If the human person is an emergent mind-body interactive reality over time—evolutionarily, gestationally, during life—then an account of postmortem personal survival should reflect that reality” (80). Divine causality and sustaining activity constitute the grace that leads “the organic seeds of a self”—both during life and after death—to an “emergent resurrected body” (86–87). A resurrected body is joined with a resurrected self, understood by Kamitsuka in good gospel-based fashion and in keeping with feminist and womanist theologies as a person with an embodied story that has unfolded over time and continues to unfold in ever-graced ways. Like the thief crucified with Jesus (Luke 23:42–43) (98–99), God like a mother (on my reading of 101) both re-members and remembers resurrected persons: “God storicizes, so to say, the risen self until the body can remember and speak its own mind . . . [and] take up again weaving its story” (88, 89). This process, Kamitsuka argues, also applies to uterine, miscarried, and aborted beings or to differently abled people (chapter 5), albeit with a different “storied selfhood” (92). God, Kamitsuka speculates, “preserves even the trace of an unknown embryo’s story” and “wills to bring that nascent being into personhood in the afterlife” (93). Engaging with feminist disability theology and ethics that rejects compulsory ableism in heaven, differently abled persons retain “the marks of their disability” (104) but lack “suffering or stigma” (108). All beings will still enjoy “the Trinity’s perichoretic dance” and “a more incomprehensible union with the vastness of a divine being beyond any imaginable embodiment” (97).

How does this emergent resurrection process apply to “creaturely resurrection” in the broader “matrix of life,” that is, to all embodied life? This question arises because in one place Kamitsuka connects a God of emergence not only to endings (resurrection) but also to beginnings (creation): “God did not create a perfectly normal world but rather an emergent, impermanent, vulnerable, and mutually dependent one” (114). Ecofeminist theologians from the late Sallie McFague to Ivone Gebara have long promoted a relational ecological imaginary by reflecting in an incarnational way on the Earth as the body of God and on all life—human, more than human, planetary, and cosmic—as interrelated in one same sacred body.8 Similarly, indigenous ecofeminists like the late Paula Gunn Allen interconnect somatic, social, ecological, and cosmological bodies. Harming or healing any bodies in this matrix affects negatively or positively all other bodies, respectively.9 Since bodies matter to the divine and embodied hope matters to all interdependent bodies in the web of life, how does God’s storicizing process in Kamitsuka’s view overlap with an ecological imaginary and thus impact not only human life but all creaturely and earthly life, encompassing even the planet itself and the cosmos?

Pneumatological Imagination

“Spirit-guided moral agency is the birthright of all people” (124). Returning to women’s reproductive agency and decision-making (chapter 5), which is incredibly important for women of color who face increasing maternal mortality rates in our time, Kamitsuka describes coerced and compulsory childbearing and nurturing as immoral acts (which characterizes the post-Roe world in which we live) and ascribes virtue to women’s reproductive consent and dissent (112). Women’s Spirit-inspired discernment practices and prayer (121) aid them during precarious pregnancies and while navigating religioculturally and socially constructed experiences of self-doubt and stigma (119–20). As Kamitsuka claims with a theological riff on incarnational solidarity, “God so loved the creature’s moral agency that God sent the Paraclete” (105).

Kamitsuka empowers women’s self-trust “and an acceptance of . . . parenting limits” (120) through their Spirit-based moral agency (117). Their agency is exercised “within a theology of limits and the obscurity of divine providence” (119, cf. 123), and thus Kamitsuka emphasizes “epistemic humility” and “moral uncertainty” (116, 123) in these times. Here, Kamitsuka extends in new ways prior feminist and womanist theologies of the Spirit, interlinked with creation and with eschatological hope in healing in the face of suffering (e.g., Elizabeth Johnson, Karen Baker-Fletcher10). However, could Kamitsuka’s argument about Spirit-guided moral agency be fruitfully informed by feminist and womanist ethics of conscience (e.g., Anne Patrick, Kristin Heyer, Kate Ott, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, emilie townes), and if so, how?

In religious rhetoric about abortion and reproductive rights, the unborn are frequently oddly invisible. Partly this befits the mystery of the whole process, resonant of Psalm 139’s invocation of being knit together in the darkest and most secret depths: it is, after all, strikingly recently in human history that prenatal ultrasounds have provided even the fuzziest images of fetuses. Protest banners lining the routes to sexual health clinics, sometimes showing graphic imagery of fetal tissue following termination, purport to center the reality of what pro-life advocates deem these most vulnerable innocents. Yet it seems to me that none of these actually does justice to the truth of how little we know.

I have been pregnant, to my best knowledge, eight times, but these pregnancies have resulted in only one living child. I had no idea how little all the tests and investigations across hospitals in four cities would tell me—how little, it seems, we collectively understand—about what is going on in those earliest weeks of pregnancy, about why pregnancies do and do not stick, and (perhaps most of all) about how little medical professionals are ready to commit to breaking bad news even when it seems a situation has only one possible outcome and a miscarriage is inevitable, given that weird stuff just happens sometimes.

The mysteries and uncertainties of those early weeks can make pregnant (or would-be-pregnant) bodies feel alien and unfamiliar even to those who inhabit them. Hormone fluctuations, for whatever reason they occur and whether they are linked to puberty, pregnancy, illness, or other causes, can make us feel out of control. But perhaps what they really are is a reminder of how limited our control was in the first place and how thin the illusion that we have agency over life actually is. Discourses surrounding (in)fertility remind humans of how much there is about our own bodies and their processes that we cannot control and to which we do not have access. This might feel particularly frustrating to those humans more used to being able to make and enact decisions about their lives.

If this is an indignity to privileged modern pregnant and would-be-pregnant people, most of whom are women, then perhaps it is somehow even more of an indignity to those (usually men) even more used to being able to make the world do their bidding. Yet patriarchal control of pregnant and would-be-pregnant bodies, including increasingly stringent surveillance of those who seek to end pregnancies and decreased access to even medically necessary termination, also and emphatically does injustice to the actual ambiguities of early pregnancy.

Perhaps being honest about how careless and wasteful nature itself seems to be of early embryos, later fetuses, and even born offspring is in itself unnerving to us, because we wish it were not so: we wish there were no such things as futility or cruelty or evil and injustice. We want to believe we live in a just and ordered world. We want to impose justice and order on it where we do not see them. But our capacity to do so is limited.

Margaret Kamitsuka understands early pregnancy in all its messy ambiguity, sensitively holding together space for those who want to mourn the early fetuses lost before birth as their full children and those who want to hold as central the right to terminate fetuses until much later on. Kamitsuka’s Unborn Bodies offers profound reflection on the nature and theological significance of the unborn—especially, and notably, those who die before birth, perhaps in the earliest weeks—rendering these beings neither more nor less than they are.

Theological lacunae and silences over the centuries about early pregnancy losses and the cosmic status of those who die before birth might be understood to have been means of sidestepping difficult questions about salvation and the bounds of the soteriological community. Yet resourceful parents have, shows Kamitsuka, always sought ingenious ways to attain salvation for their dead neonates by whatever means they believed were necessary (such as secretly burying unbaptized infants in unmarked graves in consecrated ground or reverently in the foundations of their own houses). Folk ritual has often had to make up the lack where official religion has failed to speak or acknowledge the realities of everyday life and death.

Kamitsuka observes correctly, and contrary to much pro-life rhetoric, that those who have unwanted miscarriages and those who seek terminations are often the exact same people (and we know, too, that many people who have abortions do so precisely to protect the goods of their already-living children). Those politically committed to safe, legal, and available abortion have frequently shied away from ascribing personhood to the early fetus on pragmatic grounds and might consider that theologizing the unborn is likely to muddy things and erode reproductive rights even further. As Kamitsuka notes, however, despite these understandable concerns, there are good grounds for thinking anew about the unborn and their eternal destinies. Questions concerning the putative post-resurrection existence of the unborn are “speculative but not ridiculous” (4).

Kamitsuka is hesitant to ascribe personhood to the unborn merely on the grounds of potential. Yet she also takes seriously that the unborn might carry forward into their postmortem existence germs or seeds of a self that never came to fruition in this life. Thus, she seeks to develop a “nontoxic eschatology” (11) that can give space for the postmortem existence of the unborn without being readily weaponized for an anti-rights agenda. She seeks to circumvent the problem of conceiving of the unborn post-death as souls without bodies but is also well aware (drawing on disability theologies) of the potential problem of radical discontinuity between bodily life in this world and the world to come.

Engaging in depth with materialist emergence philosophy, she argues that personhood is emergent and processive: persons gradually, not all in one moment, acquire their internal sense of self and capacity to relate to others. Consequently, “Persons function as complex, emergent mind-body systems. . . . The mind never lacks the presence of organic bodily matter out of which it emerges and upon which it supervenes. Body and brain emerge and survive as a dynamic system together, or not at all” (82). Death interrupts this togetherness and is even more interruptive when an unborn being has not yet developed a body at all. Unless we want to do away with a connection between earthly materiality and heavenly existence altogether, though, holds Kamitsuka (which would make bodily resurrection superfluous for everyone), resurrection—including for the unborn—in some sense begins immediately after death.

Death, however, is increasingly understood by doctors and scientists less as a sudden, certain moment and more as a “window of time” during which cells remain alive and some biological processes continue even after a person has technically died, not a hard definitive line (83–84). Building on Paul’s metaphor wherein resurrection bodies germinate and grow from earthly “seeds,” then, Kamitsuka suggests that minuscule bodily particles might “seed” the life that will gradually develop and exist after death (84), reaching full fruition only at the eschaton. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:37, after all, holds that what is sown is not yet what it may become. We might, however, think of embryonic seeds that will develop into recognizable post-resurrection bodies, connecting actual and as-yet-unrealized matter.

Crucially, therefore, “Resurrection is not the soul rising like a ghostly mist from the corpse. Let that cinematic image go. Emergence drops a new idea into theology’s palm. God carries the cellular matter of the just-deceased person over the threshold of death, and out of these seeds, a slow blooming resurrection” (130). The resurrection futures of the unborn thereby prove both continuous and discontinuous—like everyone else’s—with earthly existence.

If so, then, as Kamitsuka holds, in one of the book’s most significant moves, existing personhood need not be a prerequisite for resurrection, for God recognizes the nascent potential for personhood in what had already existed and wills it to develop beyond death (93, 126). This theologically devastating narrative allows us to conceive of postmortem resurrected bodies for the unborn but without having to hold that embryos and fetuses are already persons. Kamitsuka thereby sensitively and compellingly holds space for mourning the lost unborn but without playing into the hands of those who would mobilize a concept of postmortem existence for the unborn for its most noxious political effects in terms of erosion of reproductive rights.

Christian theologians through the centuries have loved to make grand and expansive claims about the significance of human reproduction (and, more specifically, reproductive capacity as male and female) as synecdoche for something more. Sexual reproduction and giving birth to live young are things shared with most other mammals, not unique to humans. Maleness and femaleness and the capacity for sexual reproduction and mammalian birth have thus sometimes been deemed signs of our creatureliness, our responsibility not to just do whatever we like, because we are creatures of a creator who has specific purposes for us.

Yet to invoke animal reproduction as natural and to mean only positive things by that is to gloss over a host of inconvenient facts. While the majority of those who have children care for them well whether they were originally wanted or not, we recognize that some humans torture, abuse, and neglect babies and children, even their own offspring. This, uncomfortably, is also something we share with other species: indeed, many other animals seem fairly casual about their pregnancies and the resulting offspring. Nonhuman animals, too, frequently appear to make pragmatic decisions about which of their young to raise and which to sacrifice, especially when resources (such as food or parental energy) are scarce.

For humans to take our animality seriously will mean knowing it as intimately as we can, coming to understand as much about it as we can, to honor it and do it justice but without sentimentalizing it or shying away from its sometime bleakness. That is not to say that human animality is better than that of other animals who cannot interrogate it scientifically in the ways that humans can. Rather, it is precisely continuous with other aspects of our human-animal natures. Humans as a rule are curious creatures. Wanting to know and understand is not an illegitimate usurpation of divine authority. Rather, it frequently stems from living a vocation to combat suffering and injustice.

Kamitsuka’s close and generative engagement with the best contemporary philosophies of materialist emergence, grounded in increasingly sophisticated scientific understandings of the liminality of death, is a gift. She has formulated a theology of the unborn that does not either diminish the grief experienced by many people at early pregnancy loss or make this grief such untouchable ground that there can be no wider reflection on how the goods and moral considerability of the unborn and of born human others interrelate.

My outstanding questions to Kamitsuka are these:

Maggi, you conclude by noting that the concept of emergent resurrection gives space for generative speculation about the possibility of some postmortem existence even for the earliest embryos. You note a fourth-century voice stating that those who die before birth will be adults at the resurrection and know their mothers; you suggest that if the stories of terminated fetuses and their mothers do remain somehow entwined in the world to come, then in what passes between them “there will be no recrimination, guilt, or sorrow but acceptance and a peace that surpasses all understanding” (131).

My question is whether that acceptance might still function as a kind of fatalistic prison: does the resurrected formerly pregnant person have any choice but to be reconciled with this now-adult with whom no relationship had been developed? Given the ubiquity of early pregnancy loss usually before a pregnancy had even been suspected, are those with uteruses who have been sexually active in life likely to meet a whole panoply of perfect-stranger adult children in death? Where the pregnancy arose through nonconsensual or enforced sex, is acceptance of an ongoing relationship beyond death undermining the formerly pregnant person’s desire to have no permanent legacy of the event?

Thank you, Maggi, for the gift of this book and for your ongoing wisdom.

Dear Maggie,

Engaging with your work in Unborn Bodies was not an easy task for me as I found myself navigating a complex terrain. I deeply respect how your proposal for a “budding materialist emergent resurrection” aims at providing solace and focuses on healing from harmful theologies, particularly for those who have experienced reproductive loss. Yet I am compelled to address a fundamental difference in our approaches. My commitment to decolonial and ecofeminist ethics clashes with a theological framework centered on heavenly eschatology—a concept that, while important to your framework, I have come to question and moved away from. As a queer Latina woman with indigenous heritage, my identity bears the scars of colonization—a fragmented sense of self that struggles to reconcile with religious frameworks that continue to operate within the body-soul dualism. This struggle is a visceral reminder of the ancestral knowledge that was disrupted, a knowledge that saw the interconnectedness of all things, a knowledge colonization sought to erase.

In my previous works, I have explored how hierarchical dualism, particularly the separation of reason from nature, which underpins the separation of body from soul, played a profound role in generating theological constructs that justify the demonization of indigenous cultures and perpetuate modern racism and sexism (Nogueira-Godsey 2019, 2021). This kind of hierarchical thinking has shaped Western perspectives on the land, contributing to systems of exploitation and the current climate crisis (Nogueira-Godsey 2024). You critique the traditional Christian emphasis on the soul as the key to the afterlife and the negative implications of this dualism for women’s experiences of embodiment. However, your continued reliance on a soul-body distinction, however nuanced, perpetuates a hierarchical understanding of the human being that has been used to justify exploitation, where some humans are considered superior to the Earth and its inhabitants—thus entitled to use them for their purposes. While I appreciate your attempt to reclaim the concept of heaven as an affirmation of the body, I believe a more radical shift is necessary to fully address the historical and ongoing consequences of such hierarchical thinking—one that embraces the interconnectedness of all beings. As Latin American ecofeminist theologian Ivone Gebara argues, a vision of salvation and resurrection grounded in “relatedness,” breaking down the dualism between God and the Earth, offers a path toward a truly liberatory theology (Gebara 2002, 2005, 2023).

You critique liberation and ecofeminist theologies for abandoning the idea of heaven to focus on present salvation. This shift, you suggest, dismisses the individual’s need for hope and comfort in the face of grief and loss and overlooks the body and its needs (Kamitsuka 2024, 26–31). However, this critique misinterprets the profound emphasis on embodiment, spirituality, and healing within these theologies, particularly within ecofeminist and indigenous liberation theologies. In addition, these traditions offer crucial perspectives on systemic injustice and the interconnectedness of oppression that, although challenging, can enrich your analysis to further challenge the ingrained colonialist paradigm that still permeates Western Christian theology and practice. Countering this critique, liberation ecofeminist theologies, as exemplified by Gebara (2002), offer a powerful reimagining of salvation and resurrection. By emphasizing embodied justice and the interconnectedness of all beings, these theologies ground salvation in orthopraxis and embodied spirituality, providing a tangible and empowering response to suffering in the present while actively working toward a more just future. This reimagined vision, far from dismissing individual needs or the body, offers solace and agency to challenge oppressive structures, creating a more just world for themselves and future generations. Furthermore, by treating diverse liberation and ecofeminist theological perspectives on salvation and resurrection as a monolith, you prompt the question of which specific theologies you are referencing and how their nuances inform your critique.

Despite these differences, I want to shift from a critique-focused essay to a more constructive dialogue. In previous publications, I echoed the argument made by Willis Jenkins that we do not need a shared understanding of the divine in order to confront shared problems (Nogueira-Godsey 2022). Both of us share a commitment to defending women’s bodily autonomy and cultivating their moral agency. We seek the deconstruction of toxic theologies to promote healing experiences for people within and outside institutionalized religions. Engaging with your work offered me a valuable opportunity to explore the complex intersection of embodiment, liminality, and spirituality as decolonial practices for healing. I see fertile ground for a constructive dialogue by exploring these points through the lens of Latina feminism and ecofeminist liberation theologies.

Liminality and Vulnerability

Latina feminist scholars in the US, such as María Lugones and Mayra Rivera, have created a vibrant body of work that challenges dominant Western paradigms. They offer alternative ways of understanding the body, spirituality, and healing, rooted in the interconnectedness of body, Earth, and community. These scholars emphasize the agency of women, particularly Latinas, in shaping their own narratives and resisting oppression. Drawing on decolonial theory, feminist thought, and indigenous epistemologies, they illuminate how women experience and navigate the world through their bodies. I see this reflected in the concept of the pregnant body as a colonized site, a powerful metaphor explored by many Black and Latina feminists. This concept highlights the ways in which power dynamics and control mechanisms are imposed upon women’s bodies, especially during pregnancy.

Your portrayal of pregnancy as a liminal experience—a potential time of great moral growth and development—brought to mind these scholars’ work on embodiment, the borderlands, and liminality. Lugones defines liminality as the spaces of the in-between. It is the state of existing on the border between two worlds (Lugones 2003, 59). For Lugones, experiences of liminality are experiences “of being in excess of ‘what you are within a structure'” (Medina 2020, 216). They are experiences of being outside of the norms and expectations of any particular social group or identity (Medina 2020, 215). Lugones argues that those in-between spaces exist beyond rigid social structures, offering a vantage point from where one can most clearly stand critically toward different structures and become acutely aware of their multifaceted identities (Lugones 2003, 59). This resonates deeply with the experience of pregnancy, a time when the body is literally in-between, defying easy categorization. By acknowledging the ambiguity and fluidity of pregnancy as a liminal space, you challenge rigid categorizations and create space for a more inclusive understanding of women’s experiences.

Like these Latina feminist scholars, you propose that validating embodied experiences, particularly experiences of bodily processes (e.g., eating, growing, giving birth, sickening, aging, dying, putrefying), is crucial to empowering Christian women to form new understandings of their bodies and move beyond the confines of societal expectations and religious doctrines, fostering a sense of personal agency and spiritual growth. The traditional Christian understanding of suffering as punishment for sin has historically led to a negative view of the body’s processes—bodies were considered distractions to be overcome in order to attain true knowledge, you argued (2024, 67, 145). This resonates with Gebara’s critical analysis of hierarchical dualisms within Christian theology and their role in the colonization of women’s bodies in Latin America’s history. She argues that by separating heaven from Earth, mind from body, spirit from flesh, and human from nature, Christian narratives that associated women with the “lower” realm of the physical created a framework where women were seen as less ethical, closer to nature, and therefore justifiable targets of domination and control (Gebara 2003). Specifically, Gebara highlights how this association allowed for the ideological colonization of women’s bodies by framing their “proper” roles, feminine values, and behaviors of a virtuous woman as divinely ordained and “natural” (Gebara 2003). This effectively subjugated women to the will of the dominator by presenting God’s will as the justification for their predetermined place in society.

To address the dissociation these theologies caused between intellect and the wisdom of bodily experiences, you, like Gebara, recognize the potential for healing by relating to the liminality of human vulnerability and suffering not as resulting from original sin or something to be passively endured but rather as an inextricable aspect

Margaret Kamitsuka’s Unborn Bodies dares to enter the conversation about the eschatological future of unborn bodies and the fraught experience of the mothers that bear them. She does so with a poetic voice befitting the precarity of both mother and child.

Unborn Bodies takes its readers on a sustained, unflinching journey through back doors and into the hidden rooms, rooms that have remained deliberately closed, keeping from public view the unseemly “oozing” bodies of women. Readers visit the land of sorrow and shame, travel through both heaven and hell, pause to converse with the minds of church fathers only to return to the wailing of distraught mothers. Unborn Bodies holds its readers’ hands as it walks them through the varied experience of emptied wombs and makes compassionate claims as to how heaven and earth weigh in.

Kamitsuka’s book exposes much, and the much it exposes is as ambiguous as its subject. There is the question of how to think about the content of the impregnated womb: Is it a child or not a child, and if it is a child, when does it get its soul, and what does that mean for its eternal future—heaven, hell, or like the answers to such questions have remained, an eternal in-between? Then there is tension, if not outright contradiction. There is the tension between the church’s condemnation of abortion on the grounds that the fetus is a child combined with the church’s reluctance to declare that child worthy to be numbered among the saved. There is equal tension in the feminist resistance to any “humanizing” of the content of the womb lest it infringe upon women’s freedom and choice. Then there is the notable and curious lack of sustained theological history—from the early church fathers all the way to the present—that adequately addresses the soul of the unborn and the status of any potential heavenly citizenship.

There is the mired problem of what to do with the women. Unborn Bodies narrates the finger-pointing. Sinful Eve’s reputation shadows her daughters forever, so it seems. There is the broken heart of the women who miscarry, searching for answers that neither the church nor feminism can offer. The church’s mixed messaging, at its best, can only offer platitudes regarding the child’s salvation but no official ritual to memorialize. This, while feminism rejects the grief in total lest the admission of grief gives ground. There is the problem of innocent women versus guilty women, women suffering miscarriage versus women damned for their abortions. There is the problem of patriarchy, not only governing women’s bodies but casting a theological net so wide as to meddle in the women-only world of sisterhood, of feminine bonds and affections, dividing mothers and sisters and nieces and friends, lest the entire sisterhood’s societal standing and eternal salvation come into question as well (as if they haven’t already).

Kamitsuka’s book addresses all of these issues, weaving in and out of each situation and each argument with such organic deftness as to demonstrate that life and argument never fit into straight lines and boxes, but just like the bodies they seek to govern, they overflow into a messy mix. Sacrament, baptism, burial, eternity—in the moments that they count most, are absent of the minister who can offer personal and heavenly resolution, simply because the theological and philosophical implications of the particularly earthly circumstance resist progression into uncharted territory. The situations long ago kicked down the road, with hopes that the problem would always remain just out of reach. Kamitsuka, however, is done with the avoidance of the past, and her book is her way of saying so.

But she also knows her book is not the end or final word. Her book is the beginning, the beginning of a longer conversation, a longer effort to address the pain and suffering of those affected by a prematurely ended pregnancy. Unborn Bodies advocates constructive theology as the way forward. Constructive theology “implies that new thinking, questioning, and debates are possible while maintaining a connection to the tradition’s historical norms.” It is the holding on to the old “regula fidei of the tradition” while moving into new territory and moving beyond “worn concepts.”

It is in light of her call to theology and my deep admiration for her courage that I, a biblical scholar, take the baton and walk through two doors that Kamitsuka opens, specifically relevant to women’s afflicted and bleeding bodies: Mark’s woman with the twelve-year flow of blood and the sinful woman who prepares Jesus for burial as she washes his feet with her hair. My project is not an attempt to draw Kamitsuka back to the past; rather I write about the Bible to do exactly what she advocates—be faithful to the tradition (here Scripture) while also being theologically constructive.

“The woman with the flow of blood,” as she is known in biblical shorthand, had suffered for twelve years before she approaches Jesus in the temple. Whether she actively sought him out or impulsively took advantage of the unexpected opportunity of the moment is not said; in the end it matters not. Kamitsuka rightly narrows in on the patriarchal appropriation of the overall story. “A twisted ecclesial logic links the blood taboo to Jesus’s healing of the hemorrhaging woman (Mark 5). The church prides itself in understanding the true meaning of Jesus’s beneficent act of overlooking her menstrual impurity. Namely, Jesus’s example confers on the (male) apostolic church the authority to pronounce on the meaning of women’s blood.”

But Mark’s gospel is subversive, especially when it comes to women, throwing shadows at traditional patriarchal mansplaining. The woman with the flow of blood suffers. While modern debate continues as to what level of exclusion she suffered in society, none of that is the point here. The woman suffered with a blood flow for twelve years, rendering her “unclean,” and she spent all she had under the hands of (presumably male) doctors, to no avail. The gatekeepers of the God of Israel (the rabbis, Pharisees, temple leaders) were no better able to help her. Numbers 5:21 describes the punishment for the woman found guilty of adultery—her uterus would drop and her womb discharge, conveniently emptying her womb of any nefarious and sinfully procured contents—a divinely imposed abortion, among other things. In the literary biblical tradition, Mark’s description of her ailment subtly alludes guilt and sin, in the same way that pain in childbirth cannot help but recall Eve, sin, and fairly imposed punishment.

Moreover, Mark leans into the implications of her contagion making her “unclean.” Somehow, her very touch can compromise—it can compromise men and all that is holy. This woman, secretly and without permission, touches. She doesn’t even need to touch Jesus’s flesh, just his cloak. It is enough. She takes from him power; she doesn’t ask or need his consent.

The woman and her contagion take not just from the man but from the God. There is nothing, it seems, that he can do about it. She turns him into a leaky object as well. His power seeps out of him, gone before he can pull it back, and he doesn’t even know who took it. “Who touched my clothes?” Jesus asks (5:30–31). The exchange is telling. The disciples are incredulous. “You see the crowd pressing upon you, and you ask ‘Who touched you?'” But the woman’s touch was no ordinary touch. It was an unclean touch, a desperate touch, one that intended to take what the touch bestowed upon her. “She felt the flow of blood stop immediately and that her body was healed” (5:29).

The woman is not found out, but she outs herself at his ask. She owns her transgression—the one where she takes without permission like her guilty foremother long before, whose actions also imposed upon the man she was with. But rather than chastise, Jesus honors her. “Daughter,” he says, “your faith has made you well. Go in peace, free from your disease” (5:34). This woman violates community norms. She touches where she should not. Her touch does exactly what the patriarchy fears—it takes male power, divine power. But Jesus does not condemn. He praises her for taking herself, for her faith, for her initiative. Stigma, guilt, ailment—not just gone, but publicly so. The woman is declared righteous not just because of the divine man’s forgiveness but because of her action. Jesus is not just advocating for grace to such but modeling both the male and divine response to the woman imposing upon him, disturbing his containment, and taking his power. Jesus says “yes” to all of it and by doing so suggests a new way forward for the church.

The story of Jesus’s anointing at the hands of a woman while at a private dinner event is notably represented in all four gospels. In Mark 14:3 and Matthew 26:7, the woman approaches Jesus with an alabaster jar of expensive ointment and simply pours it on his head. This in itself is enough to make everyone uncomfortable and rile the spectators. Nobody dares comment on the awkwardness or inappropriateness of the act; they instead channel all their indignation into a piety toward the needy. “How wasteful! This could have been sold and the money given to the poor!” Matthew even reports that this rebuke came from the disciples. But Jesus defends her, admonishing all of them to leave her alone. “She has prepared me for my burial,” he says. This woman seems to be able to read the room better than any of the men present.

But Matthew and Mark are tame in comparison. Luke and John tell a racier story. In both of their versions, the woman pours the ointment on Jesus’s feet! Anyone familiar with Hebrew would know the euphemism at play and understand this story to now be sexually charged. Just as Naomi uncovered Boaz’s “feet” and asked him to play the role of kinsman redeemer (Ruth 3:7), so Jesus will go on to “redeem” the world. Needful biblical women have a way of using feet as a way of saving themselves. But there is more.

In John, the woman is Mary, sister of Lazarus (the man Jesus raised from the dead), and she proceeds to wipe his feet with her hair, a precursor to Jesus washing the disciples’ feet (12:3; 13:5). But in Luke, the woman’s identity, while unmentioned, is not unknown. The Pharisee who invited Jesus to dinner notes that had Jesus been aware of the spiritual condition of this woman, he would never let her touch him (7:39). She is, after all, a notorious sinner (as if it might have been better for a pious woman to interrupt the dinner party to anoint a guest’s feet with her hair).

The woman cannot stop weeping, and her many tears mingle with the oil. Her sinful nature more of a contagion than the water dripping from her face—the sloppy mix of liquids overflowing onto him, though this man, this God, welcomes it. But even more, she has come to prepare him, to prepare Jesus to share a woman’s experience. He too will bleed and ooze. He too will be disregarded as a sinner. He too “will get what he deserves.” It is John’s gospel that describes the piercing of Jesus’s side. Already dead, the soldier spears his body; blood and water flow. Birth. Many have understood this moment to be the birth of the church. The blood, the water, Eve from Adam’s side. A virgin birth like Mary’s. So much wrapped into this moment. But in the middle of it all, the God-man gushing liquids like a woman, and yet these liquids holy, salvific even, though it was the sinful gushing woman who prepared him for it all, starting the timer.

Precarity oozes from these two biblical women. They are women without help or standing. They are women with pasts. They are women whose bodies are called into question. And they are women who serve as biblical precedents—women whose condition mirrors that of unborn bodies and the women who carry them. Both these women demand attention, like the women that show up in the offices of pastors and priests insisting that the church attend to their spiritual crisis. They are women who live with sorrow and shame and whose lives hang in the balance between heaven and hell, even as they are dismissed by the religious to tend to their earthly pain and eternal souls themselves. But they refuse to be silent. They are like Rizpah before David, lamenting their loss and refusing to take “no” for an answer from male leadership who finds them inconvenient. And God commends them for it. Moreover, these are only two in the long line of biblical examples that would testify from the perspective of the tradition and speak on behalf of the women to whom Kamitsuka has given voice. There are others in line, waiting for their turn to speak. The biblical text itself has included them and thus empowered them; the voiceless now speak.

The doors are open for more. Unborn Bodies has made it so, unleashing the potential for the many varying avenues of vibrant and necessary conversation on this topic. The hope is that the real need of real people that Kamitsuka has highlighted will become priority, and the call she has issued answered. Whether in the church or in feminist and nonreligious circles, pastoral and compassionate “people-first” approaches are in desperate need. But that requires the charting of those uncharted philosophical and theological territories. Kamitsuka has begun the necessary work. It is now on others to follow suit.

One straightforward and uncontroversial definition of abortion is that it is a medical procedure with the goal of ending a pregnancy. But perhaps no other medical procedure is endued with as much moral significance as abortion, perhaps apart from assisted suicide. And this is because abortion is understood not only in terms of its outcome but also framed as a matter of intent. As Margaret Kamitsuka writes, historically women have often been consigned to one of two scripts—the traumatized victim who loses her baby to miscarriage on the one hand and the evil woman who has elected for an abortion. This distinction is made despite the reality that both a miscarriage and an abortion strictly share the same end—that is, the loss of fetal matter.1

In the United States, at least, this latter reality has often been characterized as a secular one by “pro-life” Christians. And “pro-choice” proponents are often portrayed as callous or selfish persons who not only do not honor the sanctity of life but ridicule religion as a source of sexual and gendered oppression. Pro-life proponents have often heralded Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as a victory for the protection of vulnerable life, while pro-choice advocates have pointed to how the fallout from this court decision will only exacerbate the trend of maternal mortality (as of this writing, media outlets have been covering the circumstances leading to the death of Amber Nicole Thurman in Georgia).

But the existence of religious groups that advocate for reproductive choice, such as the Religious Community for Reproductive Choice, contests this caricatured portrait of an ideological divide. It is not only that women’s experiences are diverse and that multiple and measured factors contribute to a woman’s decision to not carry a pregnancy to term. It is also that despite a common conception that the issue of abortion is a recent and secular feminist phenomenon, reflection on abortion possesses a longer history in various religious traditions. Kamitsuka has already covered this ground in her previous book, Abortion in the Christian Tradition, and Jewish, Muslim, and Christian perspectives are offered in her coedited volume with Rebecca Todd Peters, T&T Clark Reader in Abortion and Religion: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives. Kamitsuka’s fruitful metaphor of “gestational hospitality,” read through the parable of the Good Samaritan, illustrates her assertion in this present book that theological possibilities exist that affirm abortion can be in alignment with Christian beliefs (125).

What the above also suggests is that different faith communities depend on multiple, but also overlapping, authoritative sources to construct their normative arguments for and against abortion. As a theologian, I find Kamitsuka’s attention to tradition and Scripture generative because overall, abortion has often been considered an ethical issue that raises the question of moral responsibility rather than a doctrinal one that concerns itself with how theological beliefs should be observed or practiced in ecclesial life together. What I want to excavate in the remainder of this essay is how Kamitsuka approaches the question of the unborn as a matter of doctrine rather than simply theology and the value and limitations of doing so. I do this because I think this expansion will be not only helpful by amplifying her ecclesial and scriptural commitments but also how her doctrinal approach might open conversations among Christians who differ on their views of abortion. Finally, her argument for emergent resurrection as doctrine, I think, is significant because of how doctrine shares some analytical similarities to law. I will return to this speculative connection at the end of my remarks.

Kamitsuka begins by distinguishing between two theological narratives that have often run parallel in the Christian tradition—one being the dominant or “official” theological stance forwarded by church authorities (read: male) regarding human reproduction and the other being the ordinary, lived theologies of women who have experienced miscarriage or had an abortion. Again, the church has typically made a distinction between women who have had miscarriages and those who have had abortions. But Kamitsuka then also offers a survey of responses of how theologians have answered the question of what happens to the unborn in either event. And the responses here converge, suggesting two things. One, by dissolving the constructed binary between women who miscarry and those who abort, Kamitsuka reframes the issue of reproductive endings as one less of judgment and more of pastoral care.

This pastoral shift enables her to doctrinally shift from teleology to eschatology. It is true that the two doctrines are related, but by narrating women as having experienced loss (whether by miscarriage or abortion), she temporarily arrests the question of women’s moral agency at this point to consider an alternative framing of fetal loss. It should be emphasized that this framing is not only pastoral—”People who experience a reproductive ending need not only community and anger but also an imagined future. Whether one’s state of mind is inconsolable grief or breathless relief, one’s life has changed” (29)—it is also a profoundly Christian one, but with an analytical approach that is not often undertaken in either conservative or progressive Christian circles. So it is also important to note that Kamitsuka’s analysis is a feminist one, one that takes seriously how eschatological appeals have been weaponized in order to justify continued oppression of minoritized communities and women on earth.

Kamitsuka wends her way between the theological and pastoral by way of a “postliberal regulative approach to the ‘grammar’ of doctrine” (94), embedded in her chapter, “Emerging into Resurrected Life.” In doing this, she draws upon George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine. Kamitsuka offers that this regulative approach (to use Lindbeck’s language directly)—a “cultural-linguistic” versus a “propositionalist” or “experiential-expressivist” one—better captures the tension between continuity and change in the Christian tradition. More specifically, it balances a consideration between women’s moral agency and God’s providential care, an expression of God’s ontologically eternal reality. In this sense, Unborn Bodies can be understood as a kind of test case for a doctrine of emergent resurrection for which Kamitsuka is advocating. An “orthodox” approach to doctrine, like a “cultural-linguistic” one, will exhibit a kind of coherence between “formal rules of faith, codified in creeds, catechisms, and liturgical practices” (94). At the same time, this coherence is best understood as context-bound, so that the images and stories expressing doctrinal beliefs may vary depending on context.

The basis of Kamitsuka’s argument relies on surveying various theological treatments addressing the question of the unborn after death. In her telling, this question has been mainly one concerned with theological anthropology, hinging on the relationship of the soul to the body. Her succinct survey of theological thinking on the eternal status of the unborn illustrates how theological anthropology has shifted through time—not only depending on the reigning metaphysical framework of the day but also the doctrinal commitments that were shaped alongside those frameworks. For example, Calvin’s creationist interpretation of the soul—that it was created at the moment of conception—influenced his ideas about infant baptism, which was connected to his doctrine of election. The point of Kamitsuka’s survey is not to identify diversity for the sake of showing inconsistency but rather to lay the groundwork for a cultural-linguistic approach to the doctrine of resurrection.

Another way to say this with the issue at hand—whereas we have become accustomed to propositionalist approaches from pro-life Christians (arguments that depend on biblicist interpretations of personhood, conflating content with form) and experiential-expressivist approaches from pro-choice Christians (symbolic or individualistic interpretations, without much consideration to ontology), a cultural-linguistic approach recognizes the value of both approaches and indeed their precedents in the Christian tradition. For Lindbeck, the value of a cultural-linguistic approach is to incorporate temporal and historical interventions while upholding the particular distinctives of a doctrine.

One does this, Lindbeck contends, by understanding that doctrines are second-order statements about God rather than first-order ones that objectively describe the “inner being of God or of Jesus Christ” (Lindbeck, 80). To read Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin’s theological anthropologies as second-order affirmations, then, enables them to be in ecumenical conversation with each other. But more critically—as revealed in the theologians’ silences or struggles themselves—this characterization of doctrines points to their limitations when considering the lived realities of mothers experiencing miscarriages or infant death. And the interesting outcome of this realization is understanding that women’s experiences can, and should, inform a doctrine of resurrection.

Again, it bears emphasizing that Kamitsuka constructs her doctrine of emergent resurrection with recourse to the scriptural witness, even as she turns to materialist philosophy and evolutionary biology to help construct her resurrection ontology. The metaphors of root and seed serve to correct a historical overreliance on the soul for doctrines of resurrection and to truly focus on the resurrection as one “of the body” (57, emphasis mine). Kamitsuka recognizes that there is no uniform depiction of what will happen after death; she rightly recognizes 1 Corinthians 15:52 as a portrait of resurrection that conflicts with her constructive offering. Ultimately, Kamitsuka attempts to balance between her affirmation of a bodily resurrection with a trust that God is the one who will bring about this miraculous event, both of which are acknowledged in scripture.

I end my reflection by asking two questions, one that expands on the metaphors of the root and seed and the other that considers the implications of a regulative approach to doctrine for the issue of abortion. One, I am curious how a doctrine of emergent resurrection might inform liturgical or political practices of ministering to women who have lost pregnancies. I would be not only interested in hearing some possibilities of how hymns, services, or prayers could affirm the pastoral possibilities of emergent resurrection. Moreover, could such liturgical examples lend themselves to communal healing and repair? I find Hannah Matthews’s narratives of her experiences as an abortion doula evocative along these lines (You or Someone You Love: Reflections from an Abortion Doula, 2023), exemplifying what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “narrative plenitude.” Extending this question, perhaps the paucity of our imaginations around emergent resurrection comes in part from a predominantly individualistic approach to the question of the unborn. Kamitsuka points both to the value and limitations of the language of rights, which I affirm and recognize as a critical formation to American individualism. But also the language of rights speaks to an unstated but assumed relationship to the land, one that is primarily characterized through alienation and the framework of private property. To what extent might a more expansive spiritual economy of reproductive rights be related to repaired relationships to land, to ecology?

Two, Lindbeck’s concept of a regulative approach to doctrine largely emerged from a deep interest in ecumenical and interreligious relations. Kamitsuka’s regulative approach to the question of the unborn, then, naturally raises the question of how we might begin to have these conversations with those who may be on the other side of the issue from ourselves. And insofar as the imprint of certain theologies are made evident in various laws on reproductive rights, does a regulative approach to doctrine have the capacity to transform not only the church’s ministry to women who have experienced pregnancy loss but also temper a binary approach to reproductive rights? I realize that this question is somewhat fanciful; and yet, if a doctrine of resurrection cannot stir our imaginations to different possibilities in the here and now, then I think it has failed. For Kamitsuka’s book, this is not the case.