My mother gave birth to me at age 19, unmarried, alone and uncertain of her place in the Church. She taught me from a young age to value the priesthood, and I sensed in her a great longing for it in our home. Growing up the oldest son of a single mom, I felt a great loss and loneliness for the priesthood in my house. Upon turning 12 my mother, already a nurse and a parent of three, felt the need to defer to me to choose who would say the blessing on the food and the evening prayer, to “preside” over our weekly Family Home Evenings, and to lay my hands on her and my siblings to pray when they were ill. I feel pained for her and us, her kids, when I think of how easily things could have been different if she had been recognized by those in our faith and our fledgling family as the head and not an incomplete, ever-expectant, prosthetic body.
Now as an adult working in medicine the blessings of female leadership are evident to me. It wasn’t until women began crafting public health policy in the 1950’s that high infant mortality and maternal deaths became of a thing of the past. It was the insight and wisdom of women that drastically changed the paradigms of the social sciences and biology to shift the focus from conflict to cooperation. Wherever women are allowed to enter the highest stations of influence as equals, those institutions are blessed by their perspectives. When we allow women to be ordained, the Church will be blessed in ways we cannot foresee.
I have a young daughter who I am confident will bless the world when she comes of age, and I pray that she can also bless our faith as prospective leader without limits to how much she can contribute. I believe that women should be ordained.