What Is the Reason for Hardships of Life in the Womb? Is It Beneficial to Endure These Hardships?
You may have wondered about the reason for the pressures we face in the world. Interestingly, according to the Law of Proportion, some of the pressures in the world are similar to the hardships of life in the womb. This lesson will focus on why we must bear these pressures and how the hardships of life in the womb ultimately influence our circumstances in the world. We will answer these questions by looking at the fetus’s life in the womb and how he interacts with his surroundings.
Consider parents who are expecting a newborn child. They regularly monitor the fetus’s condition during pregnancy and analyze his health status in the mother’s womb using various tests, ultrasound, and fetal movement assessments. For those who see the fetus from the outside, the condition of the fetus is one of two scenarios: Either he is healthy and progressing according to his predetermined developmental plan, or he is not healthy. Of course, in many cases, despite being unhealthy, the fetus can normally live without any problems in the womb because this lack of health is typically defined in relation to the tools he requires in the world. For example, the fetus in the womb does not care whether he has two hands or one hand. Perhaps he can move more freely in the womb with one hand. However, as soon as he is born and exposed to the world’s conditions and standards, he becomes aware of his shortcomings and problems.
When parents detect their fetus’s health issue from the outside, they do not hesitate to make every attempt to treat the fetus in the womb. The mother’s womb, with its incredible constructive capability, is considered to be the optimum environment for solving the fetus’s problems and making him compatible with the world’s conditions. As a result, parents and doctors often choose to treat fetuses in the womb to improve treatment outcomes and save time and resources. However, this may cause pain and discomfort for the fetus inside the mother’s womb.
How Important Is Life in the Womb?
Life in the womb is extremely important in terms of its constructive capability since the womb’s constructive power is millions of times more than that of the world. In a short period of nine months, the womb creates a body that can live in the world for years. However, the world cannot even create a finger joint, and it imposes significant time and pain on its residents for the treatment of minor flaws and diseases. Because of the world’s limited constructive capability, doctors prefer to treat the fetus during the stages of fetal development. Of course, the prenatal period is usually not very important in terms of the quality of life, to the extent that we do not even consider the nine months in the womb as part of our life span. We normally have limited resources in the womb and are preparing for the environment we are about to enter. For example, our only resources in the womb are a placenta, an umbilical cord, and the interior space of the womb, but after birth, we are confronted with a world in which seas, galaxies, the complicated structures of different creatures, and so on, are only a part of it.
Therefore, parents often understand that some challenges in the womb, while potentially difficult, can help their child adapt to life outside the womb and ultimately live a more comfortable and fulfilling life. The fetus who is unaware of the world beyond the womb and is unfamiliar with the mathematics of the world experiences all these pains and sufferings in ignorance. Definitely, it is easier for him to spend his time in the womb in peace, free of these challenges, because he is unaware of the vast and complicated environment that surrounds the small womb. From the fetus’s perspective, all these acts and pressures are pointless and disrupt his peaceful life in the womb. After birth, the fetus understands the reason behind all those pains and sufferings in the womb, realizing that all those pressures were related to the flaws that could have disturbed his life outside the womb and made it painful. In other words, he was forced to accept temporary pain to avoid extreme and long-term misery.
We are all infallible in the womb during the fetal phase; that is, we have no control over the process and level of our growth, as well as any potential deficiencies or strengths in our bodies. Our development in the womb is influenced by a pre-determined plan as well as our mother’s influence on the womb, leading to a successful or unsuccessful prenatal period. Ultimately, we benefit from the opportunities of the world based on how well we adapt to its conditions. However, the hardships of life in the womb are not limited to the mother’s womb alone, and according to the Law of Proportion, they also apply to our life in the womb of the world; we will discuss this topic in a separate article.
The Reason behind Religious Rulings
The ups and downs of the fetal period are very different for an observer outside the womb compared to the fetus itself. If the fetus in the womb could cause problems in forming any part of his body or stop his development, after his nine-month life in the womb, he would suffer for the rest of his life in the world. Such is our relationship with religious rulings. When we only focus on limited worldly life, religious practices like compassion, kindness, khums,[1] zakat,[2] prayer, fasting, hijab, and altruism can feel difficult and burdensome.
Following these religious guidelines might mean giving up some worldly pleasures, but they nourish our souls with qualities that will benefit us in the hereafter. We leave our placenta behind when we come out of the womb into the world because we no longer need it in this world. At the time of leaving this world, we will also leave our body behind and will be born into the hereafter only with our soul or heart. The quality of our birth into the hereafter depends on how much we have used the world to acquire a sound heart and how much we have cultivated our soul to enjoy and use the features of the hereafter, which is billions of times greater than the world.
We require resources to use each feature of the hereafter. It is true that the fetus in the womb feeds on blood, but he is born with a mouth, tongue, sense of taste, and digestive system, all necessary for experiencing diverse flavors in the world. If we are unaware of the greater and more beautiful world surrounding the womb, we perceive the fetus’s efforts and development as unnecessary and even futile. When we are in the mother’s womb, worldly life is invisible to us, just as the hereafter is hidden from the view of the inhabitants of the world. When we are born into this world, we face the outcome of our hard efforts in the womb, and we require everything that we developed there. Similarly, at the moment of birth into the hereafter, we will be confronted with and require what we have acquired throughout our lifetime in the womb of the world.
In this lesson, we examined the hardships of life in the womb. We stated that since the fetus is not aware of the mathematics of the world, he may deem the hardships of life in the womb and his efforts worthless. After birth, the fetus understands the reason behind his development and the process he went through in the womb. Parents and doctors who observe the life of the fetus from the outside know that the womb has a great constructive capability. As a result, they are ready to expose the fetus to these hardships so that he can become compatible with the conditions of the world.
Do you think it wise to endure the hardships of life in the womb to become compatible with the world? Feel free to share your thoughts with us.
[1]. The financial obligation that requires Muslims to pay a fifth of their savings from the income of the year that has just ended
[2]. A charity that Allah obligates Muslims to pay yearly on their surplus money and some forms of property to the poor and needful