Thanksgiving After Childbirth

The Churching of Women is a rite of blessing and thanksgiving for a mother after childbirth, marking her first return to church following the birth. It draws on the biblical account of the purification of Mary and the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple forty days after his birth, and behind that on the purification laws of Leviticus, though the Christian rite came to be understood primarily as thanksgiving for a safe delivery rather than as a cleansing from impurity.

Widely observed in the medieval and early modern West and long a familiar feature of English parish life, the Book of Common Prayer provided an order for the Thanksgiving of Women after Childbirth, it has largely fallen out of use in the modern period, as unease grew over any implication that childbirth left a woman in need of purification. Where it survives, and in the parallel blessings of some Eastern churches, it is framed as gratitude for the child and the mother's safe passage through the danger of birth.