Niddah 71: Blood When Alive/Dead as Nerves; Sources of Ritual Impurity

The Gemara continues to compare a woman who is menstruating when she dies with a man who is a zav.  Rabbi Yehuda teaches that when a woman emits a quarter-log of blood, she is not due the ritual impurity of menstruating women.  Rather, the blood that falls from the child (ambiguously through her "safe family" or her "safe foster home") is ritually pure if it is displaced after death.  Rabbi Yehuda says that when a woman who is in childbirth transits ritual impurity while she is still alive only transmits ritual impurity if she continues to bleed after she has died.  The corpse itself might be considered to be the tent.

The Gemara discusses the blood of submission.  This is blood that leaves the body during and after the person's death.  If this is more than 1.5 logs of blood - or, perhaps more than one full log of blood - then this is the blood of submission.  

A new Mishna notes that when a woman has given birth to a male child and waited seven days or a female child and waited fourteen days then immerses in the mikvah she then pours water from a vessel into her hands to rinse the Paschal offering.  She is permitted to have intercourse with her husband, but her status is like one who has immersed but the sun has not yet set.  Thus she takes on second-degree ritual impurity and confers third degree impurity upon teruma she touches.  

Beit Hillel says that she is permitted to touch any vessels.  Beit Shammai says that a woman's status is always like one of a corpse.  A corpse is a primary source of impurity and will make every vessel impure.  It is vividly clear that some rabbis understand that women's bodies are bodies, just like those of men, and that we need to be treated as people.  Other rabbis see women as foreign creatures with special powers that are frightening and need to be tamed.