Children Who Come in from the Cold: On Infertile Women and the New Frontiers in Procreation

Infertility in ancient times: Guardian angels and pomegranate seeds. In 300 B.C.E., in a work inspired by Plato, Methodius of Olympus writes of ten maidens who would stroll in the garden of Arete, completely absorbed in considerations on women's matters. In his «Symposium, or on Virginity», Methodius recounts that, in their daily discourses, the young philosophers would address issues relevant to the world of women: the main concern of mothers and of maternal love in the raising of women, the influence on the emancipation of Eros and on all significant aspects of sexuality, from enjoyment to fertility, without neglecting any issue, including even abortion and adultery; close attention was paid to matters relating to procreation and infertility.

This essay, of amazing modernity, which indicates the «sublime excellence» of virginity not as an ethical quality, as a purely religious ideology may lead one to imagine, but rather, in an intent that could be considered metaphorical, as an aesthetic generation (Zorzi, 2003) and a mysterious primordial condition of a free and impartial female awareness, comparing it in the extreme to the inability to procreate. The conquest of Eros and of procreativity in the couple, contemplated as instruments of the perennial fecundity of God, include, in the discourse, the figure of the Father as a third party. The transmission of the feminine, taken up and handed down from woman to woman, from virgin to mother, celebrates the passage from virginity to the birth of passion and the definitive transition from parental ties to love between a man and a woman, as a couple, but without there being in this a freedom to love, and to love a man, nor the oblivion of the mother or the forgetting of the father - of God the father - since in their name the lineage continues.

In particular, the words of Theophila, one of the learned girls, appear premonitory of a future time, when she declares that each child, however conceived under the protection and wo