“What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to champion being a woman? Well, it’s not that we aren’t anything. It’s not that we can be anything – male, female, or whatever you want to call yourself. Being a woman is not saying that I am all of these imperfections. It’s not saying, ‘I’m just a sack of body parts to be used and abused.’ Being a woman isn’t my own self-doubt or self-loathing, or any other list of ‘nots’ or insecurities.”

Timmerie began a segment of Trending with Timmerie, talking about what it means to be a woman, especially in a world where the concept of womanhood has seemingly become lost and obscured through the sexual revolution, gender ideology, and the feminist movement.

These movements flipped the script by radicalizing the antithesis of womanhood, exclaiming that being a woman isn’t about bearing children. It’s not about fertility or about being a wife, a mother, a virgin, or a pious member of a religious order. To society, women have evolved beyond these roles. Those roles are no longer seen as valuable. Having children is seen as a burden, and being a wife and mother, a form of enslavement.

In many ways, feminism has encouraged women to become men. But women are not men. Men and women are equal in dignity and worth, but not beyond that. The sexes are not called to be mirror images of one another, but complimentary of one another.

Being a wife and mother couldn’t be further from this fiction that’s being perpetrated by the secularists of our time. Giving up one’s life for one’s spouse and children is one of the purest acts of love, sacrifice, and liberation. God, from the very beginning, made man and woman in His image to bear offspring and care for the earth. And he made it so because accepting God’s will to do so would unite His sons and daughters to Him.

“God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

“Dominion, not domination. Dominion. And I just pause for a moment there because I think we live in a third-wave feminist society that says to be a woman means to dominate, to be the dominator. But we are called to have dominion, not domination,” said Timmerie.

Besides giving dominion of His world to man and woman, He told them to be fruitful and multiply. As Timmerie continued, that directive is two-fold: To be fruitful means to have purpose. Live life with a goal or an end. Be fruitful to the world by doing good and living righteously. Be virtuous and cultivate virtue in all things. “Every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.” (Matthew 7:17)

The second part of that directive says to multiply. God created us for this potential: to procreate, bear, carry, and care for children. Women are blessed with the responsibility of bringing new life into the world. While man participates in the pro-creation of that new life, no man can bear and birth a child.

“Although [women] are all created with this potential, not all women will cultivate the biological reality of motherhood. God [calls] some people to live consecrated virgin lives. God inspires and calls some women to be biological mothers,” said Timmerie. “But there’s also the challenging and sorrowful dysfunction of the cross of infertility.”

Timmerie clarified her use of the word “dysfunction”, saying that those who bear the cross of involuntary infertility have not done anything wrong. In fact, it is often a long and difficult path to walk, with much suffering and heartache along the way. While man and woman are called to produce children, there are those who have been asked by God to bear this suffering patiently and willingly with love. The “dysfunction” that Timmerie refers to is merely that of the body; in some way, it has failed to operate as originally intended. And thus, God formulates a different plan for those people.

When the responsibility of bearing children is neglected, stripped, or denied, we mourn the loss of motherhood. Third-wave feminism attempts to persuade women that the loss of motherhood should be celebrated as a liberation from responsibility, but the technology that takes it away does more harm than good (surrogacy, contraception, abortion, IVF, etc.)

“The bottom line is this: If Eve’s name means to be ‘the mother of all the living’, if Eve’s name Chava (Hawwah) means ‘to breathe’, ‘to live’, ‘to give life’ in Hebrew, that is all about potential. Not all women will be mothers, but there’s this potency within us.” And that potency is at the core of womanhood.

Tune in to Trending with Timmerie weekdays at 6pm CT