We Christians understand the spiritual principle of
marriage and that it mirrors the relationship between Christ
and the Church. We also understand that the permanency and
sanctity of that union is to be protected from promiscuity and
divorce. At the same time, we have had no way of knowing that
there were also progressive, physiological changes occurring
in a woman’s body that identified her tangibly with her
husband’s DNA and genetic code. We were not alone in that
intellectual gap. Until now, science has not had a suitable
explanation why, in a single act of human conception, the
woman’s body usually produces a single ovum while the man’s
body produces more than 50,000,000 sperm. Like the ovum, each
of these millions of sperm contain the father’s entire DNA and
genetic code. Each is capable of reproducing his ancestral
lineage into a thousand future generations.
Previously, it was assumed that this massive number of
sperm was intended only to provide for “survival of the
fittest,” helping guarantee the strongest and best of the
man’s body to become the parent of his progeny. At best, this
was an inadequate explanation. Not only did it not guarantee
“survival of the fittest” but that reasoning was eliminated
due to the woman’s producing only a single ovum. The big
question remained, “Why the enormous overload of spermatozoa?
Why such purposeless waste of the male genetic-potential?”
According to recent discoveries by Dr. Carolyn Coulam, a
reproductive immunologist at the Sher Institute for
Reproductive Medicine in Chicago, these fifty-millions of
sperm are not wasted at all. They serve a very different
purpose but one equal in importance to the sperm that
impregnated the ovum. As students of the Bible, it is this
second aspect which we need to understand.
Let me present both the Medical and Biblical views:
Medically, any foreign matter introduced into a woman’s body
comes under immediate attack by antibodies in her immune
system. Theoretically, this attack-principle also targets the
male spermatozoa. Her system should destroy it and the
impregnated ovum. In other words, conception could occur and
then be destroyed by her own white cells. But that does not
happen. The explanation is found in Dr. Coulam’s discoveries.
Instead of dying in the womb, these fifty-million sperm-cells,
which are not involved in conception, are immediately absorbed
by the woman’s white blood cells and carried intact and alive
throughout her lymph system. Here, in places far removed from
the womb, their new work begins. Semen contains an agent
called TGF-beta, which--over a period of prolonged exposure to
the woman--educates her immune system to accept her husband’s
foreign cells. Without this very specialized and crucial work,
her white cells might attack and destroy her own
pregnancy.
While conception can occur with a single contact, many
women require a seven-month period of exposure to their
husband for these changes to take place. During that period of
her body’s absorbing his spermatozoa she literally becomes
“bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.”
