Quotes on Childbirth

In all cultures, the midwife's place is on the threshold of life, where intense human emotions, fear, hope, longing, triumph, and incredible physical power-enable a new human being to emerge. Her vocation is unique.

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.

Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss.

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

My mother's idea of natural childbirth was giving birth without makeup. She was hyper-positive - the world is a wonderful place, rainbows and unicorns. If you said anything contrary to her, you were basically exiled.

Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.

People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

No woman should fear losing her life from pregnancy or childbirth.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

In the way that women forget the pain of childbirth, men forget that they cry in movies.

Birthing is the most profound initiation to spirituality a woman can have.

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.

The suburban housewife - she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife - freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother had found true feminine fulfillment.

In achieving the depersonalization of childbirth and at the same time solving the problem of pain, our society may have lost more than it has gained. We are left with the physical husk; the transcending significance has been drained away.

Everything grows rounder and wider and weirder, and I sit here in the middle of it all and wonder who in the world you will turn out to be.