To Florus 6.29

Yet lest we seem to have passed anything over carelessly, consider another point. Childbirth pain is known to vary with mothers’ bodies and strength. Women among foreign peoples and shepherds, hardened by exertion, give birth during journeys with such ease that they tend and immediately carry their offspring without interrupting the labor of travel. Not exhausted by childbirth’s difficulty, they transfer the womb’s burden to their shoulders. Generally, poor women’s lack of resources requires no midwives’ services. By contrast, wealthy women are softened by luxury: the more attendants each has, the more she learns and desires to be ill, and she thinks she needs as many services as she has available.

The hands of wealthy husbands certainly never experience the first human’s misery among thorns. Confident in their resources and placed beyond fear even of hunger by extensive estates, they consider it beneath them to spend a moment wishing for fertility. Sometimes, as the poet says, they order: ‘Unyoke the oxen, provided you send truffles’ (Genesis 3:16–19) (Juvenal, Satires 5.119).

If, then, women’s childbirth pain belongs to nature’s arrangements, as shown both by irrational animals’ example and the precise divine pronouncement; if withholding of fruit and the rise of thorns were created among other things but made denser and more troublesome for particular people; if childbirth’s difficulty and soil’s thorniness vary with bodies and regions; if the former pang continues in women’s inward parts after grace, while wealthy luxury knows nothing of the latter; and if the reason bodily dissolution would follow was expressly stated and attached to the manner of making rather than to errors—then here too everything plainly agrees with catholic truth. Neither women nor thorns help you at all.