Birth Quotes

I'm feeling the need for a birth so I thought I'd share a collection of my favorite quotes, though not always pertaining to birth, they can certainly be applicable.

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)

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

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

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

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

The best way to avoid a cesarean is to stay out of the hospital.
Brooke Sanders Purves

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.

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

There is no scientific evidence that doing over 10 percent of births with a cesarean improves the outcome for the woman or improves the outcome for the baby.
Dr. Marsden Wagner

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

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Unknown

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

We cannot prepare for the future without embracing the meaning and the relevance of the baby's perspective on life.
Michel Odent, MD

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

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

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

Mothers need to know that their care and their choices won't be compromised by birth politics.
Jennifer Rosenberg

In response to "The morbidity risk in cesarean birth is nominal with little risks."
Sure there is: blood loss is 100%. Pain is 100%. Prolonged (compared to vaginal birth) disability must approach 100%. Scarring is 100%.Do you dispute that these are morbidities?
Bob Woolley

The extent and magnificence of the medical discoveries made during the last hundred years is beyond both praise and gratitude. But now that many of the troubles and dangers have been overcome, we must move on - not only to save more lives, but actually to bring happiness to replace the agony of fear. For although the consciousness of a woman's discomfort can now be dispelled, it is only at a price, for with it goes the awareness of birth and the joyful sensations and emotions that should accompany it. Now we must bring a fuller life, truer to natural law, to women.
Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, M.D.

One is constantly having to balance the high expectations of modern health care with the need to respect the human soul. This is especially so with birth.
Benig Mauger

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

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

I'm an advocate of truly having your eyes opened and honestly appraising how much power you really have, not pretending that you will have as much power as you desire, just because you really want it. I think that's the essence of informed consent.
Gretchen Humphries

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

The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
L. I. Sweet

To be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves.
Unknown

You are a midwife, assisting at someone else's birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: "We did it ourselves!"
from The Tao Te Ching

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 16:20

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

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

All over the world there exists in every society a small group of women who feel themselves strongly attracted to giving care to other women during pregnancy and childbirth. Failure to make use of this group of highly motivated people is regrettable and a sin against the principle of subsidiary.
Dr. Kloosterman, Chief of OB/GYN, Univ. of Amsterdam, Holland