Childbirth Quotes

Give it up for the process that leads to childbirth! ~ Alex Gaskarth

Isn't it wonderful to give birth to your own kind? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Nevertheless, with reference to the natural process of childbirth one thing can seldom be forgotten, the fact that the human infant has an absurdly big head. ~ D.W. Winnicott

I will hold my babies in my hand at sacred-time. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Eve was blamed for the fall of man, and in return all women to come were to inheret her karmic responsibility for the so-called "fall of man". Their punishment was to experience pain in childbirth, and never be trusted by man or God again. ~ Frederick Lenz

In the end, the judge ruled that no woman has "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception": if a woman isn't willing to die in childbirth, she shouldn't have sex. ~ Jill Lepore

The moment of birth is a miracle . ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Yeah, well, I'll be glad to birth it if it means I can name him something normal. (Zarek)
Yeah, yeah. This from a man who whines like a two-year-old when he stubs his toe. I'd like to see you survive ten hours of childbirth. (Astrid) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

It makes me really sad that women have been ejected from the seat of their power in this society in terms of what happens around childbirth. In other parts of the world, there are places where women can't drive a car, but they're still in charge of childbirth ... The minute my child was born, I was reborn as a feminist. It's so incredible what women do. I find it metaphorically resonant that a pregnant woman looks like she's just sitting on a couch, but she's actually exhausting herself constructing a human being. The laborious process of growing a human is analogous to how 'women's work' is seen. ~ Ani DiFranco

Fredrika Bimm, what do you think you're doing?"
"Freaking out. Losing my mind. Thinking about snapping your husband's spine. Squashing the urge to vomit. Wishing I had died at childbirth."
"Oh, you say that when you don't get a prize in your Lucky Charms. ~ MaryJanice Davidson

Only rarely do doctors in training have the opportunity to sit continuously with laboring women for hours. Most are taught to intervene in the normal process so often and so early that they have never witnessed a normal labor and birth. ~ Ina May Gaskin

During childbirth and hospice I'll sing gospel songs that my grandma taught me when I was younger, or something I've made up, or I'll hum. I just play things that I think the audience will like. ~ Erykah Badu

How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother's deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn't tell, or told stories that weren't entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form. ~ Pamela Erens

I sometimes worried I'd never experience that sense of wonder you feel meeting a new friend or traveling to a new place for the first time. I was afraid the major milestones of my life, marriage and childbirth, were past. Was it foolish to hope I still had something exciting ahead of me, something even important, that I could have a life of my own? ~ Lilly Ledbetter

This is why mothers have more babies. We forget about the pain and discomfort and wild inconvenience of pregnancy and childbirth so we can feel that heavenly feeling of holding a warm baby snuggled and content against our chests again. It's like nothing else in this world. ~ Lisa Genova

There is no way out of the experience except through it, because it is not really your experience at all but the baby's. Your body is the child's instrument of birth. ~ Penelope Leach

He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal-logical-admirable refusal-to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die. ~ Taiye Selasi

The holy time establish the holy-event. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

This fact provides a rebuttal to the argument "What if a young woman aborts a baby who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer?" A rejoinder is, "What if a young woman who would have gone on to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer dies in childbirth? ~ Michael Shermer

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true
it must be true
but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires. ~ Sherman Alexie

If our suffering has a purpose, it is infinitely easier to bear than if our suffering has no purpose and no larger meaning. When a mother endures childbirth, she knows that it is leading to something life changing and glorious. ~ Eric Metaxas

With this pregnancy, unlike my others, I was fully aware of the possibility of blissful, painless, potentially even orgasmic, and fully natural, unmedicalized childbirth from the beginning. After reaching my second trimester, I was relaxing in the bath after my children had gone to sleep, when suddenly I felt a profound connection with the little girl within me. She communicated to me how this birth was going to go. How it was going to feel. In essence, I knew she would pass easily out of my body. ~ Adrienne Carmack

Birth is, without a doubt, one of the greatest self -expressive and creative processes we can embark upon in womanhood. I believe that a part of a woman's birthing heart centre resides within the pelvis and hip area. ~ Maha Al Musa

Maybe that's why God made childbirth so painful, so that when your life is wrecked by children you know it could be worse. ~ J.T. Lawrence

Childbirth is nothing. Death is mighty. The 0 to our 1. There is nothing in the world like it. But there is nothing in it that is not like the world. ~ Marion Coutts

What would she have made of her life in the absence of childbirth? Maybe no more than she did in its presence and to ponder such possibilities denies the value of motherhood. ~ Debbie McGowan

Childbirth shapes women as a horizon of anticipation. Women come into consciousness, she speculated, imagining a future pain toward which their bodies inevitably propel them. ~ Leslie Jamison

The health of your future kids does not start with their birth - it starts with you, right now, well before you plan to impregnate your wife. ~ Pratik Patil

I cried with pride as I looked into the face of a midwife from the next generation of baby catchers. ~ Peggy Vincent

We're allowed to have the Great Mother in our spiritual paradigm if she is docile and tame like Mary, or as the Goddess that saves women in childbirth or men from bombs and typhoons. But would patriarchy have us reclaim the full meaning of the Queen Mother of Compassion, or any Goddess, if it meant embodying her might bring our world into balance and emulating her caused women to no longer serve the status quo? I think looking more deeply at Goddesses like Kwan Yin/Kannon might make the patriarchy very nervous. ~ Karen Tate

Hemorrhoids Go big or go home! That was my mental response to childbirth. You want me to push? Okay, awesome. I'm going to push so hard that I not only eject this baby from me, but I'm also going to turn my butthole inside out. When I explained the issue to my OB, she insisted hemorrhoids were totally normal, and if they didn't go away, I could get a quick surgery to correct them, a suggestion that I met with a resounding "Nope!" I had already spent a month in elementary school sitting on a blowup pillow, and I'm not pulling my pants down as an adult to have surgery in my butt. So, here I am, five years out from my last birth and sitting in my chair a quarter of an inch taller. ~ Brittany Gibbons

Men need women. Women need men. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You can read the best experts on child care. You can listen to those who have been there. You can take a whole childbirth and child-care course without missing a lesson. But you won't really know a thing about yourselves and each other as parents, or your baby as a child, until you have her in your arms. That's the moment when the lifelong process of bringing up a child into the fold of the family begins. ~ Stella Chess

Children are lovable and adorable. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I want to write a song based on my own childbirth. Of course, this is all a bit premature. ~ Jarod Kintz

The sacred-time will hold my babies in my hand. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

JANE: What to do when it is that time in your girl child's life:

1. Sit down calmly and explain sex to her?

2. Buy her a book, video, or CD that gives her the details?

3. Buy her condoms and put her on the pill?

Or do as many mothers before you did - just stick your head in the sand and hope she joins a convent.

Of course these days your child may know more about sex than you did at her age, what with in-school health lessons, and out-of-school R-rated movies easily accessed on the TV, not to mention the Starr Report!

In the days of fairy tales, sex was dangerous because so many women died in childbirth. Today sex is again dangerous because of diseases like AIDS. So what do we say? ~ Jane Yolen

No one expected to be safe until this century, if you read a little history. Think of the thousands of years before- years with no law, when the sword ruled. No widespread system of justice; no immunizations against disease. The local lord free to kill the husbands, husbands free to rape and kill their wives. Childbirth often fatal. No antibiotics. It's only here and now that women are raised believing they'll be safe. And it serves us false. It's not true. It dulls our sense of fear, which saves our lives. ~ Charlaine Harris

[Queen Victoria had been denouncing the Women's Rights movement] ... And after chloroform was introduced to ease the pains of childbirth, she demanded that it be used on her. Religious and medical conservatives were shocked. They said God had decreed that women must suffer in childbirth as atonement for the sins of Eve. But queen Victoria wouldn't accept this particular anti-woman's-rights dictum. She became one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth , and knighted Dr. James Simpson, the Scottish physician who developed this use of chloroform, though he was excommunicated by his church for doing so. ~ Miriam Gurko

Work, that supposed panacea, the great Taker-of-Your-Mind-Off, proved just about as totally useless and in fact irrelevant as those 'Easy Childbirth' theories are in the face of the real thing. ~ Lynne Reid Banks

To think we have the garment industry instead of nature to thank for the zipper concept when it would have come in so handy for childbirth. ~ Jane Wagner

When avoidance of pain becomes the major emphasis of childbirth care, the paradoxical effect is that more women have to deal with pain after their babies are born. ~ Ina May Gaskin

There's no doubt that there's a struggling in birth, and a beauty and a horror and fear and joy too. ~ Patricia Arquette

Our silence around this subject, like the silence around so many topics that specifically affect the lives of girls and women - incest, abuse, street harassment, pregnancy, menstruation, childbirth, rape - is related to the second dimension of epistemic justice: hermeneutical injustice, or the injustice of having one's social experience denied and hidden from communal understanding. ~ Soraya Chemaly

I compare songwriting to childbirth. How many kids can you have before your uterus explodes? ~ Billy Joel

For me, the true miracle of childbirth is that smart, rational people with jobs and the ability to vote look at these half-melted fleshy blobs, their heads misshapen from being squeezed through a pelvis, covered in five types of horrendous gunk, looking like they've spent a good two hours rolling around on top of a deep-pan pizza, and honestly believe they look beautiful. ~ Adam Kay

Blessed is the womb that born you. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Discrimination and multiple deprivations of human rights are also frequently part of the problem, sentencing entire populations to poverty ... It is surely a matter of outrage that over half a million women die annually from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. This is nearly half the annual global death toll, and arguably, a direct reflection of the disempowerment of women in social, economic and political life. ~ Navi Pillay

Her time has come," answered Miss Lizzie. "That's why I didn't marry Harvey - long ago when he asked me. I was afraid of 'that'. So afraid." "I don't know," Miss Lizzie said. "Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be safe." She waited until the next scream died away. "At least she knows she's living. ~ Betty Smith

Whose interest does egg freezing serve? The woman's or that of an ambitious, still pretty unforgiving culture that doesn't really ever see childbearing for female employees as convenient? ~ Randi Hutter Epstein

[God] tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it's - merely descriptive.
Merely. And here is why: As human beings evolved, the brains that eventually gave rise to self-consciousness expanded tremendously. This produced an evolutionary arms race between fetal head and female pelvis.56 The female graciously widened her hips, almost to the point where running would no longer be possible. The baby, for his part, allowed himself to be born more than a year early, compared to other mammals of his size, and evolved a semi-collapsible head.57 This was and is a painful adjustment for both. The essentially fetal baby is almost completely dependent on his mother for everything during that first year. The programmability of his massive brain means that he must be trained until he is eighteen (or thirty) before being pushed out of the nest. This is to say nothing of the woman's consequential pain in childbirth, and high risk of death for mother and infant alike. This all means that women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic ~ Jordan B. Peterson

Childbirth is nothing compared to exercise, and Gary was a big baby. This is what they should do to prisoners of war when they're trying to interrogate them. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I think pain is a very - it's an extremely hard thing to empathize moment to moment. And you often don't remember your own pain, you know, that moment that you broke a limb or you burned yourself or, I think, this is a common thing that women talk about with childbirth, that the memory of the pain is hard to summon up and relive, thankfully. ~ Hugh Laurie

Did you know that when the baby starts moving that it's called the quickening?" Hope says.

I snicker. "So she's going to burst out of my stomach with a sword declaring there can be only one?"

"Possibly. Women have died in childbirth, right? The baby is essentially a parasite. It lives off your nutrients, saps your energy." She taps the bottom of a hanger against her lip. "So yeah, I think the Highlander motto could fit."

Carin and I look at her in horror. "Hopeless, you can shut up any time now," Carin orders.

"I was just saying, from a medical standpoint, it's a possible theory. Not here, but maybe in other less developed nations." She reaches over and pats my belly. "Don't worry. You're safe. You should've gotten more maternity clothes," she says, moving on to another topic while I'm still digesting that my baby is a parasite. ~ Elle Kennedy

Spiritual growth is like childbirth: you dilate, then you contract, you dilate, then you contract again. as painful as it all feels, it's the necessary rhythm for reaching the ultimate goal of total openness. ~ Marianne Williamson

Maternal health remains a staggering challenge, particularly in the developing world. Globally, a woman dies from complications in childbirth every minute. ~ Jessica Capshaw

Childbirth calls into question our very existence, requiring an expectant couple to confront not only new life but death, pain, fear and, most of all, change. ~ Elizabeth Noble

Among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people's souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another. ~ Joseph Campbell

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds
nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. ~ Dorianne Laux

People often say that women forget what childbirth is like, because if they remembered, no one would ever do it more than once. Personally, I had no trouble at all remembering. The sense of massive inertia, particularly. That endless time toward the end, when it seems that it never will end, that one is mired in some prehistoric tar pit, every small move a struggle doomed to futility. Every square centimeter of skin stretched as thin as one's temper. You don't forget. You simply get to the point where you don't care what birth will feel like; anything is better than being pregnant for an instant longer. ~ Diana Gabaldon

But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father."
"First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it."
"Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag."
"The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the vo ~ Milan Kundera

Perhaps all the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in the early years wouldn't ~ Laura Moriarty

When one begins, as I did, to analyze men after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling. ~ Karen Horney

WHAT EES ALL DEES STUFF? IN AFRICA WE DOAN HAVE ALL DEES STUFF!! WE HAVE DEE BABEE!!!"

His message was simple. It goes to the heart of what we in HypnoBirthing frequently puzzle over: Why has all the "stuff" that denies the normalcy of birth and portrays it as an inevitably risky and dangerous medical event become a routine part of most childbirth education classes? Why are couples in a low- or no-risk category being prepared for circumstances that only rarely occur? Even more puzzling, why do parents accept the negative premise that birth is a dangerous, painful ordeal at best or a medical calamity at worst? Why do they blindly accept the "one-size-fits-all" approach?"

If what couples are hearing in childbirth classes is far removed from what they want their birthing experiences to be, why do they spend so much time entertaining negative outcomes that can color and shape their birth expectations and ultimately affect their birth experience? In other words, if it's not what they're wanting, why would they "go there"? In HypnoBirthing, we doan have all dees stuff, and deliberately so."

HypnoBirthing helps you to frame a positive expectation and to prepare for birth by developing a trust and belief in your birthing body and in nature's undeniable orchestration of birthing. By teaching you the basic physiology of birth and explaining the adverse effect that fear has upon the chemical and physiological responses of your body we help you to learn s ~ Marie F. Mongan

When you say you're not a feminist, if feminism hadn't existed, and you didn't live in a feminist world, you wouldn't be saying that, because you'd be too busy scrubbing out the toilets in back while cooking up your husband's tea and dying in childbirth at the age of 34. ~ Caitlin Moran

There comes a turning point in intense physical struggle where one abandons oneself to a profligate usage of strength and bodily resource, ignoring the costs until the struggle is over. Women find this point in childbirth; men in battle. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Children see beauty in everything. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We were beginning to see that the medical profession, at the time still over 90 percent male, had transformed childbirth from a natural event into a surgical operation performed on an unconscious patient in what approximated a sterile environment. Routinely, the woman about to give birth was subjected to an enema, had her pubic hair shaved off, and was placed in the lithotomy position - on her back, with knees up and crotch spread wide open. As the baby began to emerge, the obstetrician performed an episiotomy, a surgical enlargement of the vaginal opening, which had to be stitched back together after birth. Each of these procedures came with a medical rationale: The enema was to prevent contamination with feces; the pubic hair was shaved because it might be unclean; the episiotomy was meant to ease the baby's exit. But each of these was also painful, both physically and otherwise, and some came with their own risks, Shaving produces small cuts and abrasions that are open to infection; episiotomy scars heal m ore slowly than natural tears and can make it difficult for the woman to walk or relieve herself for weeks afterward. The lithotomy position may be more congenial for the physician than kneeling before a sitting woman, but it impedes the baby's process through the birth canal and can lead to tailbone injuries in the mother. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Natural childbirth scares me. I think before you have natural childbirth you should find out how big the baby is. Three pounds
natural childbirth. Anything over three pounds
heroin. ~ Rita Rudner

You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'. ~ Terry Pratchett

I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once. ~ Euripides

Lust is the blessing of the fruit of the womb. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Having a baby can be a scream. ~ Joan Rivers

Why the number three? Probably because there are three stages to be completed: the death, the pregnancy, and childbirth. Just as the moon, which must have three days to reappear. Historically and symbolically, it is always three for something to come back: the disappearance, the construction, the birth. This is the cycle, the circle, the formula to calculate the perimeter (the life), is, let us remember, the diameter multiplied by 3.14 (Pi) ~ Marie D. F. Cachet

Righteousness coursed through her that felt like the few dizzy moments after childbirth, when she had felt simultaneously exhausted and powerful enough to move mountains. ~ Jodi Picoult

Childbirth being one's most significant life passage, those close to us when we open to birth a baby will never be forgotten. ~ Robin Lim

It is a well-established fact that in healthy loving women, uninjured by the too frequent lesions which result from childbirth, increasing physical satisfaction attaches to the ultimate physical expression of love ... Love between the sexes is the highest and mightiest form of human sexual passion. ~ Elizabeth Blackwell

According to what he tells us himself, Mrs. Fryxell used to say of Napoleon: 'I wish he could be punished for all his slaughter by having to go through a childbirth for every human being who was shot on his account'. (A. Fryxell: Min historias historia). ~ Moberg Vilhelm

$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding. ~ Frank A. Oski

This form of love is like the pain
of childbirth: so intense
it's hard to remember afterwards, ~ Margaret Atwood

She had to think about the future, her mother said. Marriage. She was sixteen now. It was time. The word made her sick to her stomach. She watched the other girls her age, braiding flowers into their hair, pinching their cheeks, smiling shyly or picking up their skirts and dancing, showing off their knees for the boys. Competing over who would live with whom in which dark hovel, who would spend their lives plowing which burned out field, making which grey stew in which sad hearth, having her hair torn out by which man, dying of which plague or beating or wretched childbirth...and she thought she'd rather die. She'd rather be dead. ~ Kimberly Cutter

I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

MANO: There's no question in my mind that we've always felt, in the heart of our Western, Christian culture, that Jesus was very much female. That is why the representations of Jesus with long hair have always been predominant in art. The Virgin Mary was later presented as a harmless sort of woman to whom we can address our need for a maternal outlet in prayer, as a safer way of dealing with the fact that Jesus was as much a woman as a man, particularly when he died.

DOOR: You said that if men don't overcome their wanting of women, society will crack.
MANO: We are coming to a point where the genders are clumsily engaging in civil war with each other. There's a lot of unpleasantness in the land. Men feel terribly threatened. Women have been crucified for many years, so they understand it and have their axes to grind as well. The truth of the matter is, Jesus on the cross is the female being exploited in every which way. I mentioned intercourse being, at its best, an act of penetration, but there are many other ways in which women have been sacrificed, whether from childbirth or being sold as wives or whatever, through history. So when the male S&M devotee binds a woman to a cross, he has to realize, if he's a Christian--

DOOR: Uh, just how many Christian S&M devotees are there?
MANO: Even if he's not a Christian, he ought to realize that he is essentially binding Jesus again, because Jesus contains in him the female--very, very strongly- ~ D. Keith Mano

I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being
the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person
than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation. ~ Gabrielle Hamilton

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. ~ Paulo Freire

(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary. ~ Amitav Ghosh

The day of birth is a sacred day. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

It seems that in our twenty-first century modern world, many women have become estranged from their primal brain and the knowledge that lies within it. Women too often hand their power over to the medical world long before they enter labour and have the idea someone else will do it for them. ~ Maha Al Musa

Until the mother faces the pain of childbirth, the child cannot be born. The Divine Trust is in the heart, and the heart is pregnant: the counsels of the prophets and the wise are like the midwife. ~ Rumi

I had no idea how we were going to figure this out. but women had been having babies since the beginning of time without doctors. Couldn't be that hard, right? I sort of wanted to punch myself in the face after that though.
Childbirth scared the crap out of me. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Good nutrition and vitamins do not directly cure disease, the body does. You provide the raw materials and the inborn wisdom of your body makes the repairs. Someday healthcare without megavitamin therapy will be seen as we today see childbirth without sanitation or surgery without anaesthetic. ~ Andrew W. Saul

The desires for both a good experience and a healthy baby are very much connected, and there is nothing wrong with wanting both! ~ Jennetta Billhimer

If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery. To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women. And imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them. ~ Michel Odent

In childbirth, as in other human endeavors, fashions start with the rich, are then adopted by the aspirant middle class with an assist from the ever-watchful media, and may or may not eventually filter down to the poor. ~ Jessica Mitford

Listen to me. Forget all you saw. Leave it. Take your mind from it. It has nothing to do with you. But use it for experience. Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women ... And another thing let it do. There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is not room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw today, so come Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. Let the memory direct your dealings with men and women. And be sure to take good care of Mama. Is it? ~ Richard Llewellyn

Nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them ... ~ Jan Struther

Is something wrong, Lieutenant North?" "Beware of Carrington," he said. "Mr. Carrington was very kind," she said. "He made no untoward remarks." "He's already got you lined up in his mind as his next wife. He's buried one already." Her breath came fast, and spots of color lodged in her cheeks. "What happened to his other wife?" Surely she wasn't interested! "She died in childbirth." "Recently?" He dropped his gaze. "No," he muttered, struggling to maintain his temper. "About ten years ago." "The poor man," she murmured. She removed her hand from John's arm. "But I'm not interested in becoming wife number two." "I'm relieved to hear it," he said. She tipped her head. "Are you? Why would that concern you?" "He's much too old for you," he said. She smiled, and her dimple appeared. "Surely he's not more than fifty." "As I said. An old man. ~ Colleen Coble

Sarah Buckley is precious, because she is bilingual. She can speak the language of a mother who gave birth to her four children at home. She can also speak like a medical doctor. By intermingling the language of the heart and the scientific language she is driving the history of childbirth towards a radical and inspiring new direction. ~ Michel Odent

So often, we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men. The men in my life - my father, Z.G., my husband, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my son - faced, to one degree or another, those great male battles, but their hearts - so fragile - wilted, buckled, crippled, corrupted, broke, or shattered when confronted with the losses women face every day...Our men try to act strong, but it is May, Yen-yen, Joy, and I who must steady them and help them bear their pain, anguish, and shame. ~ Lisa See

I would love to live free of the fear and sadness and real desperation that I think the effect of childbirth has on women, especially because we are expected to be so concerned by 'recovery' from childbirth. ~ Romola Garai