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
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 -
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
The Middle Wife
by an Anonymous 2nd grade teacher
I’ve been teaching now for about fifteen years. I have two kids myself, but the best birth story I know is the one I saw in my own second-grade classroom a few years back.
When I was a kid, I loved show-and-tell. So I always have a few sessions with my students. It helps them get over shyness and usually, show-and-tell is pretty tame. Kids bring in pet turtles, model airplanes, pictures of fish they catch, stuff like that. And I never, ever place any boundaries or limitations on them. If they want to lug it in to school and talk about it, they’re welcome.
Well, one day this little girl, Erica, a very bright, very outgoing kid, takes her turn and waddles up to the front of the class with a pillow stuffed under her sweater.
She holds up a snapshot of an infant. “This is Luke, my baby brother, and I’m going to tell you about his birthday.”
“First, Mom and Dad made him as a symbol of their love, and then Dad put a seed in my Mom’s stomach, and Luke grew in there. He ate for nine months through an umbrella cord.”
She’s standing there with her hands on the pillow, and I’m trying not to laugh and wishing I had my camcorder with me. The kids are watching her in amazement.
“Then, about two Saturdays ago, my Mom starts saying and going, ‘Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!’ Erica puts a hand behind her back and groans. “She walked around the house for, like an hour, ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Now this kid is doing a hysterical duck walk and groaning.
“My Dad called the middle wife. She delivers babies, but she doesn’t have a sign on the car like the Domino’s man. They got my Mom to lie down in bed like this.” Then Erica lies down with her back against the wall.
“And then, pop! My Mom had this bag of water she kept in there in case he got thirsty, and it just blew up and spilled all over the bed, like psshhheew!” This kid has her legs spread with her little hands miming water flowing away. It was too much!
“Then the middle wife starts saying, ‘push, push,’ and ‘breathe, breathe. They started counting, but never even got past ten. Then, all of a sudden, out comes my brother. He was covered in yucky stuff that they all said was from Mom’s play-center, so there must be a lot of toys inside there.”
Then Erica stood up, took a big theatrical bow and returned to her seat. I’m sure I applauded the loudest. Ever since then, when it’s show-and-tell day, I bring my camcorder, just in case another “Middle Wife” comes along.
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Terri here- Saw that today, and wanted to post something light-hearted. BTW, I walked into a birth the other day to hear the cry of a healthy newborn. Let me tell you, after two fetal demises last week, that sound was joyous music full of miracle and thanksgiving. I now appreciate the normal, healthy babies much more than ever. They truly are a gift from God.
Running the risk of sounding defensive, here is my disclaimer. In case anyone reading this is skeptical of midwives or homebirth: these babies would have died in any circumstance. Both of them had been dead in utero for two days before the mom noticed or labor started. These two moms had healthy, normal pregnancies and had previously delivered all healthy, normal babies.
