Birth Quotes

Here are some good, thought-provoking ones (The first one is my favorite, often quoted by Margaret):

Birth is as safe as life gets.

Harriette Hartigan

Treating normal labors as though they were complicated can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rooks

Midwifery is rooted in the natural approach. Pregnancy and birth are considered fundamentally healthy processes which have many normal variations; it is normal part of life, not a medical condition…Only when complications occur which are beyond the midwife's expertise, is the woman transferred to obstetric care.

Steiger

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

Laura Stavoe Harm

Lo, children are a heritage of the LORD: and a reward from Him.

Psalms 127:3

Life only demands from you the strength you possess.

David Hammarskjold

Fear and faith cannot coexist and they both demand different conclusions and actions.

Christy Faber

Epidurals rip women off of an opportunity to experience themselves as competent adults.

Margaret Egeland, CNM

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

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

Throughout the world, there exists a group of women who feel mightily drawn to giving care to women in childbirth. At the same time maternal and independent, responsive to a mother's needs, yet accepting full responsibility as her attendant; such women are natural midwives. Without the presence and acceptance of the midwife, obstetrics becomes aggressive, technical and inhuman.

Professor G.J. Kloosterman, Chief of OB/GYN, Univ. of Amsterdam

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 that eventful period, should hazard it negligently, unadvisedly or selfishly.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Whenever a woman gives birth to a child, she remembers the hard work no more, for the joy that a child has been born into the world.

John 16:21

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

Technology has turned the fetus into a patient, reducing the mother to being the 'maternal environment' and preventing attachment until after the ultrasound has shown the fetus to be 'normal.'

Jennifer Hall

Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; He rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!

Isaiah 30:18

Man cannot feed the baby within the uterus. What justifies his presumption that he is able to improve upon the physiological provision because the child has recently left the uterus? We can fortify and reinforce with certain substances the adequacy of both the placental and the breast nutrition, but the basic natural nourishment supplies something no concoction can contain.

Dr. Grantly Dick-Reed, M.D.

For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of POWER, of LOVE, and of SELF-DISCIPLINE.

2Timothy 1:7

A healthy woman who delivers spontaneously performs a job that cannot be improved upon.

Aidan MacFarlane author of The Psychology of Childbirth (1977)

If it hurts, get off it, move it around, rub it better.

Barbara Kott (president of the NCT)

If in doubt, breathe out

Cathy Doberska - Reading, UK NCT teacher

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

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.

Dr. Penelope Leach

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