Bloody and Undone

what God as midwife means when everything goes wrong

I am so pleased to introduce you all to my friend Lauren Cibene! I met Lauren via her delightful debut memoir, Tiger in a Lifeboat, about trauma recovery and faith deconstruction set against the backdrop of her time in India. Then I reached out to her over Instagram and was like, umm, hi, could we be friends? (She said yes). Lauren describers herself as a doubtful-yet-hopeful Jesus person writing through the messy middle of faith, hope, and humanity.

I know you will love what she has to say here. While the metaphor of God as a midwife conjures an image of a supportive figure helping us through pain that ultimately yields to joy, Laurenʼs story illuminates what midwifing looks like when joy never materializes. She generously shares what it feels like when the promise of life ends in death, and imagines a Divine who is with us even in our nightmares.

It is my honor to host Lauren as a guest here, and I trust you will appreciate the perspective she brings to the concept of God as Midwife as much as I do.

TW: ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility

~Halley

If I’m a “swifty” for anyone, it’s not for Taylor Swift. It’s for Florence Welch.

Besides the fact that her music is just the right amount of witchy and always manages to stick an aux cord into my soul, The Florence + the Machine singer and I walked through similar experiences just months apart. In August of 2023, she discovered she had an ectopic pregnancy. At the end of the same year, I discovered I had one, too.

An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg embeds somewhere other than the uterine wall. It’s an exceptionally rare thing to happen (only about 1% of pregnancies turn out to be ectopic), and it results in a nonviable pregnancy that must be terminated because it can be deadly for the mother. For both Florence and me, our pregnancies were embedded in one of our fallopian tubes.

This came with heavy bleeding and intense pain. I remember falling to my knees on my kitchen floor, unable to stand, almost unable to breathe, because of the pain. Many doctors will hear “heavy bleeding and pain” and chalk it up to a simple miscarriage progressing. This is one of the reasons that ectopics can be so dangerous. If you don’t catch them early, the growing embryo can burst, and without immediate surgical intervention, the mother will bleed out internally. This is almost what happened to Florence.

In an interview with The Guardian, she opened up about the experience, saying: “The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death.”

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

I love Halley’s message. I love how she is helping us reframe the way we think about God through the lens of midwifery. It’s liberating and beautiful and important. Thinking about God as being in the business of supporting us, like a midwife, through the birth of new things…that’s wonderful. But sometimes births donʼt have happy endings. My experience (and Florence’s) urges us to imagine God as midwife in the moments when everything goes terribly, terribly wrong:

When we are bloody not with new life, but with loss…

When, in our pursuit of life, we brush up against death…

When we face the awful reality that something must die for us to live…

After almost 6 years of trying to get pregnant (of fertility treatments and IUIs and procedures), I finally had my miracle pregnancy. Finally. Finally, finally. My baby.

But a few weeks later, I had to make the decision to terminate my pregnancy in order to save my own life. I had to make that decision. No one could make it for me. It’s something no one should ever have to face. And yet I did. In some ways, it mirrored my spiritual deconstruction experience: something had to die for me to carry on living, and it was up to me to make that excruciating decision.

A few months into my recovery, a “pro-lifer” listened to my story and then said to me, “I guess that’s where you and I are different. I would’ve done everything I could to save my baby.”

It knocked the literal breath out of me.

Did this person believe that my baby wasn’t wanted?

That this was an easy decision for me to make?

That I hadn’t considered every option?

That there could’ve been any reality in which my baby survived?

That I shouldnʼt have saved the only life I could—my own?

With just a handful of words, this person, who was as long on ideals as they were short on both science and empathy, bludgeoned me when I was at my most broken. This was their Christian response.

But do you know what my midwife and OB said?

In the moments immediately following my diagnosis, right after they told me that I would need to go immediately to the emergency room as they could manually feel the pregnancy (a 3-centimeter mass) in my tiny fallopian tube, they said:

“Lauren, this is not your fault.”

“We are going to help your body through this termination…”

“There is nothing you did or didn’t do that caused this.”

“We are going to help you through this.”

They reaffirmed my body’s innate wisdom; that my body had initiated this miscarriage because it knew the pregnancy was not viable. Through blood and anguish, it was trying its hardest to save my life. Because it knew. The way they spoke about my body, with reverence and respect, was an antidote to the self-loathing threatening to swallow me. It gave me permission to work with my body through this process. To listen to it. To love it.

When I say I see God as a midwife, this is what She looks like. Present and empathetic in the deep dark. Not rushing to fix it, because sometimes the cold reality is that it can’t be fixed. Death and the dawn are both irreversible; there is no changing that. For the things that can be changed, God as a midwife upholds our agency and affirms our right to choose.

Even as the choosing feels like putting your heart in a blender.

Photo by Lukas Robertson on Unsplash

“The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death.”

Florence makes a profound statement here about the nature of creation-as-a-verb, and it’s not exclusively biological. Quite often, when we are pursuing new life (relationally, spiritually, emotionally, creatively…) we brush up against Death. That momentary contact, white-hot and blinding, shears away things that we once thought were a part of ourselves or our destiny. If we’re lucky, it’s quick. But more often, it’s a slow ripping. A gradual tearing. Death dutifully performs her work.

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes: “We have been taught that death is always followed by more death. It is simply not so, death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones.”

Florence was rushed into emergency surgery because her ectopic burst. There was already a soda can’s worth of blood in her abdomen when she got to the doctor. Unfortunately, she lost her fallopian tube. Ten days later, she was back on stage (because women). But the experience clearly left a profound impression on her, as it would on anyone:

“I felt like I had stepped through this door, and it was just full of women, screaming.”

Florence’s brush with Death was, in fact, incubating new life. It took shape, not biologically, but in the form of her art. When I listen to Florence’s most recent album (released Halloween 2025), I hear echoes of this strange, excruciating, beautiful life/death experience that we both walked through. In Everybody Scream, she sings:

The witchcraft, the medicine, the spells, and the injections

The harvest, the needle, protect me from evil

The magic and the misery, madness and the mystery

Oh, what has it done to me?

Everybody scream

I don’t know what kind of God someone has to believe in to look at stories like mine and Florence’s and see only a moral failure. I don’t know how you hear about blood on a kitchen floor, about a body doing everything it can to survive, about a choice made through heartache and terror and love, and reduce it to an abstract principle. That version of God feels small to me. Brittle. Afraid of bodies and unwilling to sit with grief.

The God I met in this place did not ask me to justify myself. She did not turn away when I was bloody and undone. She stayed. She spoke through steady hands and calm voices and the strange mercy of modern medicine. She honored my agency when I could barely hold my own heart. She looked at my body as something wise and worthy of saving.

Florence is right. The closest I came to making life was the closest I came to death. But I am still here. Changed. Scarred. But very much alive, and carrying a story that refuses to fit inside tidy theology that has never knelt on a kitchen floor. There is both magic and misery in that. Madness and mystery. But there is also this: a midwife-God who does not flinch, who does not abandon us when we are forced beyond the edge of impossible choices, who does not conflate sacrifice with holiness.

If creation is a verb, then so is survival. Our midwife-God is beside us in both.

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