“There can’t be a child without a mother”

“There can’t be a child without a mother” is a recurring expression in the account of how Rita intervenes in Isabel’s unwanted pregnancy. Rita uses it to insist that Isabel is already a mother and to override her refusal; when Isabel later repeats the phrase, its apparent certainty is unsettled by the experience behind it.

The phrase as an argument

Rita encounters Isabel vomiting in the street as she is on her way to seek an abortion. Isabel says she does not want to become a mother and does not consider what is inside her a child. Rita answers by invoking a religious and maternal certainty: a child exists, she argues, and Isabel already occupies the role of its mother. The phrase is not offered as an open question about Isabel’s wishes. Rita uses it to deny that Isabel’s decision belongs to her.

Rita’s intervention has immediate consequences. Isabel is exhausted and dizzy; Rita takes her away from the address she was carrying and brings her to Elena’s home. The episode makes the phrase consequential rather than merely rhetorical: Rita’s belief helps determine what happens to Isabel’s body and future. The narration stresses the contradiction that Rita, who is not a mother and never will be, forces another woman into motherhood by applying a doctrine she has learned.

Repetition and reversal

The phrase returns when Isabel argues with Rita. She repeats the same proposition, but repetition does not mean agreement: Isabel’s stated position remains that she does not want to be a mother. Her use of Rita’s words turns the exchange back on itself, showing how a claim about motherhood can be repeated without resolving who has the right to define it.

Years later, Isabel recounts the circumstances surrounding her pregnancy to Elena. She describes a marriage marked by violence and control, and says she was kept under supervision during the pregnancy. This history gives the earlier dispute a different weight: the motherhood Rita declared inevitable was not a freely chosen identity for Isabel. The expression therefore links religious insistence to the material power exerted over her, rather than standing as a neutral description of pregnancy.

What the words cannot settle

Isabel’s later account also changes how the phrase functions in Elena’s presence. Elena has come seeking an explanation of Rita, but Isabel’s testimony makes clear that words and second-hand knowledge cannot convey an experience from the inside. The scene connects the earlier argument over what counts as a child or a mother with Elena’s recognition that bodily experience cannot be fully known in advance or by someone else.

The expression remains unresolved rather than becoming a shared truth. Rita uses it to make motherhood compulsory; Isabel’s repetition reveals that the imposed name does not erase her own understanding of herself. In the novel’s treatment of maternal identity, the phrase holds together a moral claim, a struggle over bodily autonomy, and the distance between assigning someone a role and knowing what that role means to her.