First exhibited in the United Kingdom in 1970 and 1973, God Giving Birth drew criticism from Christian groups who accused it of blasphemy.

Monica Sjöö (1938–2005) was a Swedish painter, writer, and political activist who lived most of her life in Bristol in the United Kingdom.

She was involved in the women's liberation movement and spent three months in the United States in the summer of 1968 when she became a part of the emerging second-wave feminism.

Back in Britain, she kept contact with the New York feminist Beila Cohen, who sent updates and material from groups such as W. I. T. C. H. Sjöö became an early exponent of the Goddess movement, where she practiced a woman-centred form of modern paganism.

Her diary from 1968 lists books she recently had read by authors such as Margaret Murray, Robert Graves and Helena Blavatsky, along with a biography of Aleister Crowley.

[2] The painting God Giving Birth was started just before she left for the United States and completed soon after her return to Britain on 21 September 1968.

In her book The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989), she called God Giving Birth "one of the most powerful images of the Mother Goddess to be seen in modern times".

[12] Within this context, a central project is the "resacralization of the natural world", and Raivio interprets God Giving Birth as "a metaphor for a socially transforming physical and sacred process or change".