Best 115 quotes in «childbirth quotes» category

I have a clear understanding of things, and no stress. A child brings regrets, not clarity. It can open up your eyes to an illusion, not a reality. But nonetheless, the gift of life is a beautiful thing; cherish it, love it, and lavish it. A birth of a child may not bring clarity, but it brings infinite love, new hope, and turns its parent(s) to a new light.

It seems that in our twenty-first century modern world, many women have become estranged from their primal brain and the knowledge that lies within it. Women too often hand their power over to the medical world long before they enter labour and have the idea someone else will do it for them.

Isn’t it wonderful to give birth to your own kind?

Parent greatest gift to their children is their bond of love.

I will hold my babies in my hand at sacred-time.

Listen to me. Forget all you saw. Leave it. Take your mind from it. It has nothing to do with you. But use it for experience. Now you know what hurt it brings to women when men come into the world. Remember, and make it up to your Mama and to all women...And another thing let it do. There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is not room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw today, so come Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors. Let the memory direct your dealings with men and women. And be sure to take good care of Mama. Is it?

Men die in battle; women die in childbirth.

My midwife partners and I at the The Farm learned by observation and experience that the presence of even one person who is not exquisitely attuned to the mother's feelings can stop some women's labors. All women are sensitive. Some women are extraordinarily so. We learned this truth by observing many labors stop or slow down when someone entered the birth room who was not intimate with the laboring mother's feelings. If that person then left the room, labor usually returned to its former pace or intensity.

Nobody ever talked about what a struggle this all was. I could see why women used to die in childbirth. They didn't catch some kind of microbe, or even hemorrhage. They just gave up. They knew that if they didn't die, they'd be going through it again the next year, and the next. I couldn't understand how a woman might just stop trying, like a tired swimmer, let her head go under, the water fill her lungs. I slowly massaged Yvonne's neck, her shoulders, I wouldn't let her go under. She sucked ice through threadbare white terry. If my mother were here, she'd have made Melinda meek cough up the drugs, sure enough. "Mamacita, ay," Yvonne wailed. I didn't know why she would call her mother. She hated her mother. She hadn't seen her in six years, since the day she locked Yvonne and her brother and sisters in their apartment in Burbank to go out and party, and never came back. Yvonne said she let her boyfriends run a train on her when she was eleven. I didn't even know what that meant. Gang bang, she said. And still she called out, Mama. It wasn't just Yvonne. All down the ward, they called for their mothers. ... I held onto Yvonne's hands, and I imagined my mother, seventeen years ago, giving birth to me. Did she call for her mother?...I thought of her mother, the one picture I had, the little I knew. Karin Thorvald, who may or may not have been a distant relation of King Olaf of Norway, classical actress and drunk, who could recite Shakespeare by heart while feeding the chickens and who drowned in the cow pond when my mother was thirteen. I couldn't imagine her calling out for anyone. But then I realized, they didn't mean their own mothers. Not those weak women, those victims. Drug addicts, shopaholics, cookie bakers. They didn't mean the women who let them down, who failed to help them into womanhood, women who let their boyfriends run a train on them. Bingers and purgers, women smiling into mirrors, women in girdles, women in barstools. Not those women with their complaints and their magazines, controlling women, women who asked, what's in it for me? Not the women who watched TV while they made dinner, women who dyed their hair blond behind closed doors trying to look twenty-three. They didn't mean the mothers washing dishes wishing they'd never married, the ones in the ER, saying they fell down the stairs, not the ones in prison saying loneliness is the human condition, get used to it. They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of a fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mothers big enough, wide enough, for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of, mothers who would breathe for is when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us. Yvonne was sitting up, holding her breath, eyes bulging out. It was the thing she should not do. "Breathe," I said in her ear. "Please, Yvonne, try." She tried to breathe, a couple of shallow inhalations, but it hurt too much. She flopped back on the narrow bed, too tired to go on. All she could do was grip my hand and cry. And I thought of the way the baby was linked to her, as she was linked to her mother, and her mother, all the way back, insider and inside, knit into a chain of disaster that brought her to this bed, this day. And not only her. I wondered what my own inheritance was going to be. "I wish I was dead," Yvonne said into the pillowcase with the flowers I'd brought from home. The baby came four hours later. A girl, born 5:32 PM.

Some of the pain had subsided, but I could tell it was biding its time, tapping its foot impatiently just at the edge of my nerves, and waiting to roar back with full vengeance.

Stories teach us in ways we can remember. They teach us that each woman responds to birth in her unique way and how very wide-ranging that way can be. Sometimes they teach us about silly practices once widely held that were finally discarded. They teach us the occasional difference between accepted medical knowledge and the real bodily experiences that women have - including those that are never reported in medical textbooks nor admitted as possibilities in the medical world. They also demonstrate the mind/body connection in a way that medical studies cannot. Birth stories told by women who were active participants in giving birth often express a good deal of practical wisdom, inspiration, and information for other women. Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman's true capacities in pregnancy and birth.

Supernatural is spiritual.

Sylvia’s first impression of Allegra was that no one had ever before had such a beautiful baby. Jocelyn’s first impression of Grigg was that he had nice eyelashes and a funny name, and didn’t interest her in the slightest. Prudie’s first impression of Bernadette was that she was startling to look at and dull if you listened, which you hardly ever had to do. Bernadette’s first impression of Prudie was that, in all her long years, she had rarely seen such a frightened young woman. Grigg’s first impression of Jocelyn was that she appeared to think sharing an elevator with him for a few floors was some sort of punishment. Allegra’s first impression of Sylvia was blurred with her first impression of the larger world. For me? she’d asked herself back when she had no words and no way to even know she was asking. And then, when Sylvia, and then, when Daniel had first looked into her eyes — More for me?

It was the midwife that tried to do me in. Truth be told, it wasn't really her fault. What else is a good Christian woman going to do when a Negro comes flying out from between the legs of the richest white woman in Haller County, Kentucky?

Má leaves me but I'm not alone, and a terrifying thought creeps into my head. Family is now something I have created and not just something I was born into.

Men need women. Women need men.

Miraculous is divine.

My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.

Niet zo lang geleden dacht hij (en Vlieghe en Dondeyne geloofden het ook) dat moeders pijn in hun buik kregen, de weeën, en dan snel naar de wc waggelden, hurkten, kakten, dat de drol meteen door buurvrouwen uit het water werd gehaald vóór hij kon smelten, en op het zeil van de keukentafel werd gelegd, waar hij door teder tegen elkaar koutende ouders tot een kind werd geboetseerd, waarop, door intens gebed opgeroepen, vanuit het raam of de schoorsteen een wind begon te waaien die neerstreek over de bruine klei, de adem van God die leven blies in de stront die kleuren kreeg en als van rubber begon te plooien en zich uit te rekken, en dan brulde naar zijn Mama om de eerste papfles.

Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us.

No matter how you bring a baby into the world (even through adoption), it's emotionally and physically exhausting - but somehow you find a way through.

Of course he won my heart. Many children did. I often thought that I should have liked children of my own if it were not for the undignified manner of getting them.

Only rarely do doctors in training have the opportunity to sit continuously with laboring women for hours. Most are taught to intervene in the normal process so often and so early that they have never witnessed a normal labor and birth.

On this one long, blessed night we refused to worry, allowing only hopes and dreams for the future of the human race, held in the miniscule hands of these newborns.

Optimum functioning of our various sphincters is easier to obtain when we understand how to better accommodate our thoughts to the needs of our bottoms. I often say that our bottom parts function best when our top part - our minds - are either grateful or amused at the antics or activities of our bottoms. It is amazing how much better our bottoms work when we think of them with humor and affection rather than with terror, revulsion, or, worst of all, look away from them in shame. Lord knows, we can't turn our backs on our bottoms.

Parent should never forget the great excitement they felt for the birth of a new born into the world.

Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact.

Remember this, for it is as true and true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.

Seamus shuddered in horror, before he pulled himself together. Determined, he reached between my thighs and shoved hard. Pain, like the fire of a thousand suns, burned through my belly. I tried to squirm away from his hands, using mine to push him away.

She is emerging (she has no choice) / into a place / like sex or childbirth, / one thing to the observer, something very different to the participant.

The first music I ever heard was only one hundred and sixty days after I was conceived. Da dum Da dum Da dum Have you ever heard the sound a blessing makes? This is it. The first thing I ever saw was only one hundred and eighty days after I was conceived. It was a bright light soft like clouds warm like candles. Have you ever seen the colour of a blessing? This is it. The first time I ever suffered was in the three thousand and sixty seconds after I was born. I listened for her heartbeat. I searched for her light. I cried for the first time until she was born. Have you ever known a blessing? A twin is it.

The grace of fulfilled dream is phenomenal.

The health of your future kids does not start with their birth—it starts with you, right now, well before you plan to impregnate your wife.

The priceless gifts (life, love, joy, goodness, family, nature) are freely given by the Creator.

The problem is that doctors today often assume that something mysterious and unidentified has gone wrong with labor or that the woman's body is somehow "inadequate" - what I call the "woman's body as a lemon" assumption. For a variety of reasons, a lot of women have also come to believe that nature made a serious mistake with their bodies. This belief has become so strong in many that they give in to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments when patience and recognition of the normality and harmlessness of the situation would make for better health for them and their babies and less surgery and technological intervention in birth. Most women need encouragement and companionship more than they need drugs.

The profound experience of childbirth does not produce profound people. If this were so, the guy with ten kids would be a prophet and priests would be out of work.

There is no room for pride in any man. There is no room for unkindness. There is no room for wit at the expense of others. All men are born the same, and equal. As you saw to-day, so come the Captains and the Kings and the Tinkers and the Tailors.

The sacred-time determines the due events.

The smooth undulating movements of Bellydance for birth aid a woman's ability to deal with her labour in an opening rather than restrictive fashion. The soothing rocking motions of the circular, figure 8 and spiral movements set the scene for a birthing woman to flow with the natural rhythms of her labouring body - to become connected not only to nature and the universe but deeply bonded to her baby within.

The wonder of the womb is the birth of a child.

We were born as a free soul. We only become enslaved in the world.

What parent can give to their children is the gift of daily prayer.

What you pray for today, will be manifest tomorrow.

Whose interest does egg freezing serve? The woman's or that of an ambitious, still pretty unforgiving culture that doesn't really ever see childbearing for female employees as convenient?

You are destiny to be; Rebuilder of great home. Restorer of mighty nation.

You are my angel.

You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what every woman went through. Not that they got ripped apart, but they had no guarantees about whether they were going to live through it or not. You know, I recently read - and I don't read nonfiction, generally - Becoming Jane Austen. That's the one subject that would get me to go out and read nonfiction. And the author's conclusion was that one of the reason's Jane Austen might not have married when she did have the opportunity...well, she watched her very dear nieces and friends die in childbirth! And it was like a death sentence: You get married and you will have children. You have children and you will die. (Laughs) I mean, it was a terrifying world.

All night I have suffered; all night my flesh has trembled to bring forth its gift. The sweat of death is on my forehead; but it is not death, it is life!

Childbirth, as a strictly physical phenomenon, is comparable to driving a United Parcel truck through an inner tube.

The best way to teach a child is live an exemplary life.