NOTES for Lev 12:1-8
The purification of a woman after childbirth often raises questions, and quite natural questions. In fact, even before the Fall God commanded the human being to "be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth." Therefore, by definition, there can be nothing sinful either in married life or in childbirth: God's command cannot be sinful. Meanwhile, purification presupposes the need to free a person either from the consequence of a sin committed by that person, or from the influence of something that entered the world as a result of the Fall, and not by God's will or according to God's design. But this cannot be said of childbirth in any way.
Why, then, is a woman instructed to be purified after giving birth to a child? Today it is utterly impossible for us to imagine what childbirth was intended to be originally. We know only that after the Fall God warns the woman: from now on the birth of children will be "painful" for her. Human nature changed after the Fall, and this change could not fail to affect childbirth. Moreover, the matter was most likely not physiology alone as such. Fallen man already carries death within himself at his very birth.
After the Fall everyone is born in order eventually to die. Only after the coming of Christ did a person's destiny in this respect change: now, when the Kingdom, according to the Savior's word, has "come near," the completion of the earthly path no longer means the triumph of death over life and the departure of the person (or, more precisely, of what remains of him) into Sheol, into the world of shadows, where there is no life, but only its miserable likeness.
In the times when the Book of Leviticus was written, however, human life was immersed in the boundless ocean of death surrounding it, and the birth of a human being was an entrance into death far more than into life, although, of course, few people were fully aware of this. That is why the woman who had given birth needed purification: at the moment of childbirth she too was immersed, if only briefly, in that ocean of death which entered her child as the child came into contact with the fallen world.
For this very reason the child had to be "ransomed" by offering the appropriate sacrifice for him, but the woman who gave birth also needed purification, as it was always needed when a person came into contact with death. Today, of course, everything is already quite different, yet this is not our achievement; we were simply fortunate to be born when death had already been conquered. The Book of Leviticus reminds us of what the Savior delivered us from by bringing the Kingdom into the world.