Favorite Birth Quotes
"We have a secret in our culture...it's not that birth is painful, it's that women are strong"
Laura Stavoe Harm
"If you don't know your options, you don't have any."
Diane Korte and Roberta Scaer
“Birth is not an illness”
--Unknown
“As you live, so you will birth.”
--Unknown
"Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers - strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength."
Barbara Katz-Rothman
“Childbirth is an experience in a woman's life that holds the power to transform her forever passing through these powerful gates remembering all the generations of women who walk with her. She is never alone.”
Suzanne Arms
"If you lay down, the baby will never come out!"
Native American saying
"It doesn't matter how you breathe, that baby is coming out"
--Unknown
”The woman, about to become a mother or with her newborn infant upon her bosom, should be the object of trembling care and sympathy wherever she bears her tender burden or stretches her aching limbs. God forbid that any member of the profession to which she trusts her life, doubly precious at this eventful time, should hazard it negligently, unadvisedly or selfishly.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Attending births is like growing roses. You have to marvel at the ones that just open up and bloom at the first kiss of the sun but you wouldn't dream of pulling open the petals of the tightly closed buds and forcing them to blossom to your time line."
Gloria Lemay
”Just as a woman’s heart knows how and when to pump, her lungs to inhale, and her hand to pull back from fire, so she knows when and how to give birth.”
“The same movements that get the baby in, get the baby out.”
maureen
“When a woman chooses an epidural, it is the last choice she gets to make.”
Penny Simkin
"Often a woman's failure to progress is really an obsterician’s failure to wait"
--Unknown
"When we as women take back our power to birth and to live as whole human beings, then we have become VBAC's-very beautiful and courageous women."
Lynn Baptisti Richards-The Vaginal Birth After Cesarean Experience
“Culture makes pain tolerable by interpreting its necessity; only pain perceived as curable is intolerable.”
Ivan Illich, as quoted in Open Season by Nancy Wainer Cohen
“We are all born naked and screaming and if you're lucky, that sort of thing won't stop there”.
--Unknown
“At a birth the heavens lean down, or perhaps it is that the racked body is spun fine to be aware of eternal things... we women hardly know how lucky we are in this. “
Katherine Trevelyan
"Birth is not an emergency. It is simply an emergence."
Jeannine Parvati Baker
"If left alone in labor, the body of a woman produces most easily the baby that is not interfered with by its mother's mind or the assistant's hand. If left alone, just courage and patience are required. Faith, if she is a believer, is the secret to having a healthy baby and being a happy mother."
Grantly Dick-Read
"If you don't need the surgery, you don't need the surgeon"..........
--Unknown
“Being pregnant and giving birth are like crossing a narrow bridge. People can accompany you to the bridge. They can greet you on the other side. But you walk that bridge alone.”
African Proverb
“Birth is like the sea: One can swim in it, be swept away by it, float, but Heaven help the fool who thinks she can control it.”
Tia, an Israeli Midwife
The reason the baby’s apgars came up nicely after 5 minutes, is because you grew an essentially healthy baby, and it was difficult for modern obstetrics to kill him.”
Gloria Lemay
“When God births a baby, He births a mother & a father, too…..and He gives them wisdom in their hearts, for that particular baby. Trust your heart.”
maureen