In early Victorian England pregnancy and childbirth were matters of both medical and spiritual concern. In this paper I will be exploring the way in which these two realms of knowledge and discourse were brought together when a radical feminist, Emma Martin, rebelled against her religious upbringing and came to dedicate the final years of her life, not simply to women, but to their wombs. She did this by lecturing on gynaecology and practising as a freelance midwife. By doing so she was not simply rejecting religious practice for that of science, but was connecting with the female embodiment of fertility, which was for her the original and essential core of human existence. In so doing she was fighting against the Christian sponsored domination of worship by men and also combating contemporary attempts to promote the role of men as midwives. In between her years as a Baptist housewife and those as a midwife she spent some time (after she had separated from her husband) lecturing from a radical socialist viewpoint. It was towards the end of this period that she published one of her most remarkable discourses: Baptism: A Pagan Rite (1844). In this text she argued for the symbolic centrality of the uterus in human cultural life.