Midwife quotes

[Stargirl]

Hi gals,

Do you have any wonderful quotes on midwifery to share? Other topics of interest are: motherhood, birth, spirit, gratefulness. These are needed for a scrapbook that I am doing as a thank you present for my Midwife.

Many thanks in advance!

[MommyBear]

http://www.mother-care.ca/birth_quotes.htm

[Stargirl]

Thank you!!!:thumb

[grace's voice]

Here are my faves, I give these to my students...


We have a secret in our culture, and it's not that birth is painful. It's that women are strong.
~Laura Stavoe Harm

The power and intensity of your contractions cannot be stronger than you, because it is you.
~Unknown

Rain, after all is only rain; it is not bad weather. So also, pain is only pain; unless we resist it, then it becomes torment.
~I Ching

The knowledge of how to give birth without outside intervention lies deep within each woman. Successful childbirth depends on an acceptance of the process.
~Suzanne Arms

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

There is power that comes to women when they give birth. They don't ask for it, it simply invades them. Accumulates like clouds on the horizon and passes through, carrying the child with it.
~Sheryl Feldman

Women's bodies have their own wisdom, and a system of birth refined over 100,000 generations is not so easily overpowered.
~Sarah Buckley

The whole point of woman-centered birth is the knowledge that a woman is the birth power source. She may need, and deserve, help, but in essence, she always had, currently has, and will have the power.
~Heather McCue

Only with trust, faith, and support can the woman allow the birth experience to enlighten and empower her.
~Claudia Lowe

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.
~Virginia Di Orio

I think one of the best things we could do would be to help women/parents/families discover their own birth power, from within themselves. And to let them know it's always been there, they just needed to tap into it.
~Karl Menninger




We are made to do this work and its not easy...I would say that pain is part of the glory, or the tremendous mystery of life. And that if anything, it's a kind of privilege to stand so close to such an incredible miracle.
~Simone in Klasson 2001

You're braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.
~Christopher Robin in Pooh's Grand Adventure

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

A healthy woman who delivers spontaneously performs a job that cannot be improved upon.
~Aidan MacFarlane author of The Psychology of Childbirth (1977)

The impossible is often the untried.
~Jim Goodwin

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.
~Eleanor Roosevelt

For God hath not give us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
~2Timothy 1:7

Anything I’ve ever done that ultimately was worthwhile…initially scared me to death.
~Betty Bender

Life only demands from you the strength you possess.
~David Hammarskjold

If a doula were a drug, it would be unethical not to use it.
~John H. Kennell, MD

Birth is as safe as life gets.
~Harriette Hartigan

We’ve put birth in the same category with illness and disease and it’s never belonged there. Birth is naturally safe, but we’ve allowed it to be taken over by the medical community.
~Carla Hartley, founder of Trust Birth and the Ancient Art of Midwifery Institute

Natural childbirth has evolved to suit the species, and if mankind chooses to ignore her advice and interfere with her workings we must not complain about the consequences. We have only ourselves to blame.
~Margaret Jowitt


The greatest danger arises from ruthless application of partial knowledge on a vast scale.
~E. F. Schumacher

If we are to heal the planet, we must begin by healing birthing.
~Agnes Sallet Von Tannenberg

If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished ever moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.
~Irma Bombeck

Making the decision to have a baby – it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
~Elizabeth Stone

What's done to children, they will do to society.
~Karl Menninger

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other, the tranquil sky reflected on the face of the mother nursing her child.
~Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The beauty of my body is not measured by the size of the clothes it can fit into, but by the stories that it tells. I have a belly and hips that say, "We grew a child in here," and breasts that say, "We nourished life." My hands, with bitten nails and a writer's callus, say, "We create amazing things."
~Sarah, from I Am Beautiful: A Celebration of Women in Their Own Words

A woman
in harmony
with her spirit
is like
a river flowing.
She goes
where she will
without pretense
and arrives
at her destination,
prepared
to be herself
and
only
herself.
~Maya Angelou

[grace's voice]

These may apply as well, though they're a little more on the political side :)


A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic. ~Dresden James

If I don't know my options, I don't have any. ~Diana Korte

Having a highly trained obstetrical surgeon attend a normal birth is analogous to having a pediatric surgeon babysit a healthy 2-year-old.~ M. Wagner

We must give women the opportunity to challenge their fears, work with them, and birth through them. Not only will this change each woman, it will change the political and medical climate in which they make these choices. ~Connee L. Pike-Urlacher

Where would all the specialists and producers of medical technology and drugs be if it were suddenly 'discovered' that when women eat well in pregnancy, eliminate drugs and stop substance abuse, almost all complications disappear? ~Anne Frye

The traditional midwife believes that birth proceeds in a spiral fashion: labor starts, stops and starts, while the baby goes down, up and down, and the cervix opens, closes and opens. Nature has no design for failure; she holds her own meaning for success. ~Sher Willis

The parallels between making love and giving birth are clear, not only in terms of passion and love, but also because we need essentially the same conditions for both experiences: privacy and safety. ~Sarah Buckley

Today, it seems that a tradition of womanhood that properly belonged to women themselves has been replaced by a tradition of technology.
~Nicole Lundrigan Aqua Baby: Birth at Home in a Tub, Mothering Magazine 2000

Women's strongest feelings [in terms of their birthings], positive and negative, focus on the way they were treated by their caregivers. ~Annie Kennedy & Penny Simkin

A study of interactions between women and obstetricians offers an explanation. It described three levels of increasing power imbalance: In the first, you fight and lose; in the second you don't fight because you know you can't win. However, in the highest level of power differential, your preferences are so manipulated that you act against your own interests, but you are content. Elective repeat cesarean exemplifies that highest level. ~Henci Goer, Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth

Reluctant doctors like to believe that they haven't much influence over their patients, but that is clearly not the case. Several studies have found that when doctors genuinely encouraged women to have VBACs, most of them did, and when they said nothing or acted neutral, most women didn't. Finally, when obstetricians discouraged VBAC in women who wanted to try it, none of them did. ~Henci Goer, Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth


The effort to separate the physical experience of childbirth from the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of this event has served to disempower and violate women.
~Mary Rucklos Hampton

Only about 15% of medical interventions are supported by solid scientific evidence...This is partly because only 1% of the studies in medical journals are scientifically sound and partly because many treatments have not been assessed at all. ~Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal

We need to get the information out there, babies are dying, women are crying and doctors are lying. ~Penny Groner

The truth for women living in a modern world is that they must take increasing responsibility for the skills they bring into birth if they want their birth to be natural. Making choices of where and with whom to birth is not the same as bringing knowledge and skills into your birth regardless of where and with whom you birth. ~Common Knowledge Trust

It has always been easier to utilize the pain relieving discoveries of science than to investigate the complicated causes of pain. Since 1850 a hundred ways and means have been discovered to rid women of the pain that has invariable attacked them, even when they most deserved the natural joy of their supreme accomplishment. ~Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, MD (1890-1959)

Attending births is like growing roses. You have to marvel at the ones that just open up and bloom at the fir st 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

...experiences have clearly shown that an approach which "de-medicalizes" birth, restores dignity and humanity to the process of childbirth, and returns control to the mother is also the safest approach. ~Michel Odent, MD

The woman’s choice itself may influence her level of anxiety and apprehension, and in obstetrics levels of anxiety have been shown to predict obstetric complications. ~Wiegers study

You are constructing your own reality with the choices you make...or don't make. If you really want a healthy pregnancy and joyful birth, and you truly understand that you are the one in control, then you must examine what you have or haven't done so far to create the outcome you want. ~Kim Wildner-Mother's Intention: How Belief Shapes Birth

The experience profoundly changed my perspective. In the hospital, I hadn't perceived the anxiety and foreboding that permeated birth until I experienced the impact of its absence among the midwives. The peace, wonder, and intimacy were infinitely greater. What a compelling difference! ~Heidi Rinehart, MD (as quoted in Ina May's Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin)

Many Western doctors hold the belief that we can improve everything, even natural childbirth in a healthy woman. This philosophy is the philosophy of people who think it deplorable that they were not consulted at the creation of Eve, because they would have done a better job. ~Kloosterman 1994

[doula and mom]

I just want to say this is a very uplifting thread! I recently had a client who birthed her 5th baby without any interventions, and although she thanked me for helping her, it was SHE who helped ME by reminding me that there are still women who believe in the natural process!