Birth Quotes
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A collection of my favorite quotes, though not always pertaining to birth, they can certainly be applicable. 

 

Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers ~ strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.

Barbara Katz Rothman

 

Peace... it does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.

 

Unfortunately, the role of obstetrics has never been to help women give birth. There is a big difference between the medical discipline we call "obstetrics' and something completely different, the art of midwifery. If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery. To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women. And imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them.

Michel Odent, MD

 

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you too, can become great.

Mark Twain

 

This whole situation [hospitals denying women the right to VBAC] is the result of the American College of OBGYN’s in 1999 changing their guidelines for VBAC in response to medical/legal concerns to require that a physician be immediately available during an entire VBAC labour. This has been interpreted by hospitals, especially those in the more rural areas, to require around the clock emergency cesarean capabilities. Now there are complications that can arise in any labour, even if there is no VBAC issue. So if a hospital isn’t safe enough for a mother to have a VBAC in, it’s not safe for her to have her baby in period. I understand that it is a risk/benefit analysis for the physicians in the hospitals and it’s all coming back to the bottom line, and that’s unconscionable.

Tonya Jamois, president of the International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) Inc., 

during an interview on Today, November 30, 2004

 

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

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 Midwifery Institute

Unfortunately, the role of obstetrics has never been to help women give birth. There is a big difference between the medical discipline we call "obstetrics" and something completely different, the art of midwifery. If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery. To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women. And imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them.

 

Michel Odent, MD

 

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

George Washington Carver

 

Anytime anyone has anything done to them by a physician, there is risk. Even a blood draw.

Dr. Tim Johnson, U of Michigan

 

Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.

Augustine

 

We can do no great things; only small things with great love.

Mother Teresa

 

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

 

The perception that there is greater medical need for cesarean in women today ignores the reality that vast numbers of cesareans are the result of iatrogenic complications. Simply put, the obstetric community has been overly zealous in ‘treating’ a normal physiological process and has been triggering many of the medical crises that lead to cesarean surgery. Greater adherence to evidence-based medicine would drop the national cesarean rate dramatically.

Obstetricians and hospitals have found that high-intervention birth, warranted or not, is very profitable. So there is a tremendous financial incentive to bypass the clinically optimal approach, and opt for convenience and profit. For example, many hospitals across the country have eliminated facility-based midwifery practices simply because the low-intervention approach, while clinically sound, does not bring in as many dollars.

Tonya Jamois, president of ICAN

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

 

$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.

Frank Oski, MD, Professor and Director, Department of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD

 

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 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

 

If we are to heal the planet, we must begin by healing birthing.

Agnes Sallet Von Tannenberg

 

To know the way ahead, ask those coming back.

Chinese proverb

 

People never sing...except in the bathroom. Birthing women also make their natural sounds next to running bath water. There is something about the power of water. People are drawn to water, spas, and sacred streams. Women in labor are drawn to water, too.

Michel Odent, MD

 

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

 

Well behaved women rarely make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

 

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

Betty Bender

 

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Albert Einstein

 

I knew how to deliver breech babies vaginally.... I knew how to keep my hands off the breech.... how to let the baby's legs and body drop and hang, suspending its weight; I knew to allow the baby's head to notch out, nape hair by nape hair, from under the mother's pubic bone.... I knew how to concentrate on watching...to observe while physics and mechanics, uninterrupted, synchronized the birth.... If it became surgically necessary to intervene, there was time, but there was time for the breech delivery, too...."

from *A Midwife's Story* by Penny Armstrong

 

...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

 

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

 

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

 

Courage allows the successful woman to fail - and to learn powerful lessons from the failure - so that in the end, she didn't fail at all.

Maya Angelou

 

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)

 

It seems that many health professionals involved in antenatal care have not realized that one of their role should be to protect the emotional state of pregnant women. 

Michel Odent, MD 

 

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

 

Normal birth is indeed possible.

Bruce Flamm, MD

 

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

W. B. Yeats

 

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

 

In every country where I have seen real progress in maternity care, it was women's groups working together with midwives that made the difference.

Marsden Wagner, MD, MSPH
Pediatrician, neonatologist and perinatal epidemiologist
Director of Women's and Children's Welfare for the World Health Organization for 15 years. Renowned author of five books, including Pursuing the Birth Machine: the Search for Appropriate Brith Technology.

 

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

 

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

 

Speak tenderly to them. Let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of our greeting. Always have a cheerful smile. Don't only give your care, but give your heart as well. 

Mother Teresa

 

Ask me for strength and I will lend not only my hand, but also my heart.

Unknown

 

Babies are such nice ways to start people.

Don Herold

 

Motherhood: It's not just a job - It's an adventure!

Unknown

 

You will emerge from uncertainty into great peace and freedom.

Unknown

 

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

Penny Groner

 

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

Jennifer Rosenberg

 

Patience is a virtue, obtain it if you can. It's seldom in a woman, but never in a man.

Unknown

 

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 lat 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

.

We try to give a birthing woman freedom to find the right position for her own needs and comfort. Unfortunately, in our society we think of birthing as something done while lying down.

Michel Odent, MD

 

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

 

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

Unknown

 

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

 

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

Laura Stavoe Harm

 

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

 

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

Rooks

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The wisdom and compassion a woman can intuitively experience in childbirth can make her a source of healing and understanding for other women.

Stephen Gaskin

 

It is no small thing that they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

Charles Dickens

 

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

 

Perhaps we share stories in much the same spirit that explorers share maps, hoping to speed each others journey, but knowing the journey we make will be our own.

Gloria Steinem on motherhood

 

Whenever I held my newborn baby in my arms, I used to think that what I said and did to him could have an influence not only on him but on all whom he met, not only for a day or a month or a year, but for all eternity--a very challenging and exciting thought for a mother.

Rose Kennedy

 

Perhaps too many of us see pain as a badge of courage -- proof that we are just as strong as men.

Laura Kaplan Shanley

 

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

 

Women today not only possess genetic memory of birth from a thousand generations of women, but they are also assailed from every direction by information and misinformation about birth.

Valerie El Halta

 

Focus on what you can do, then do it with all your heart.

Lois Wilson

 

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, from Reclaiming the Spirituality of Birth

 

To help mothers achieve pain-free childbirth, we must free ourselves from the mechanistic view of life and embrace a new holistic philosophy that does not presume to put arbitrary limits upon women, the experience of giving birth or life itself.

Laura Kaplan Shanley

 

Birth is an experience that demonstrates that life is not merely function and utility, but form and beauty.

Christopher Largen

 

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William C. Jarvis, September 28, 1820

 

Babies are bits of star-dust blown from the hand of God. Lucky the woman who knows the pangs of birth for she has held a star.

Larry Barretto

 

I think of midwifery as a seed full of potential - a seed that will grow into a lush, blossoming tree with green branches and plenty of ripe fruit for nurturing women, babies, and families.

Marina Alzugaray

 

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

 

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched...but are felt in the heart. 

Helen Keller

 

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

 

The greatest danger arises from ruthless application of partial knowledge on a vast scale.

E. F. Schumacher

 

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

Unknown

 

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

 

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

 

You can clear the path, but you can't make them walk down it.

Unknown

 

Research has shone bright lights on what women have always known: Dynamic systems are sensitive to start-up conditions. Thus, a gentle birth is life enhancing for the human organism.

Robin Lim

 

How DARE Mother Nature question SCIENCE!

Mike Tymeson

 

You're six times more likely to have a doctor who is an impostor than you are to suffer a uterine rupture. Two percent of docs are phonies (1 in 50), according to several sources I found. So instead of worrying about rupture, why not take a few minutes to check up on your doctor's credentials? It'd be a more profitable use of your time and a substantially more likely cause for alarm.

Gentlebirth.org

 

Remember, no bones this time.

Unknown

 

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

 

I know you have a little life in you yet, I know you have a little strength left.

From Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work"

 

The impossible is often the untried.

Jim Goodwin

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. And dance like nobody is watching.

Unknown

 

There was a star danced, and under that I was born.

William Shakespeare (Illustrates the "dance" of labor, and the mother of course is the "star" of the labor and well, baby is born under the mother....)

 

Only nature cures. The task of the physician should be to help nature's efforts, not combat them.

Hippocrates

 

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

 

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

 

Meconium happens

Unknown

 

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

 

You're braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.

Christopher Robin in Pooh's Grand Adventure

 

When you have come to the edge

of all the light you know

And are about to step off

Into the darkness of the unknown,

Faith is knowing that

One of two things will happen:

There will be something solid to stand on

Or you will be taught how to fly.

        Patrick Overter

 

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

 

If you lay down, the baby will never come out!

Native American saying

 

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

Robin Lim

 

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

Eleanor Roosevelt

 

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

Sarah Buckley

 

Through pain find strength

Through birth find healing

It is never easy to keep reaching for dreams

Strength and courage can sometimes be lonely friends --

But those who reach, walk in stardust.

        Flavia

 

The true sense of community lies in understanding our interconnectedness and acting from a sense of relatedness. It is a challenge. Let's begin at the beginning. That is where we can start to reweave the sacred web of life so that it once again becomes whole.

Suzanne Arms

 

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

 

No other natural bodily function is painful and childbirth should not be an exception.

Grantley Dick-Read

 

Waterbirth is one of many lovely ways to enter the world.

Judy Edmunds, CPM

 

300,000 women will be giving birth with you today.

Relax and breathe and do nothing else.

Labor is hard work, it hurts and you can do it.

Unknown

 

The way I teach women to breathe in awareness and slowly is: breathe in through your nose and out through your toes.

Unknown

 

 

The same movements that get the baby in, get the baby out

        From Birthing From Within

 

Pregnancy is the only time in a woman's life she can help God work a miracle.

Erma Bombeck

 

Pregnancy is 40 weeks at term - Your baby will NEVER be easier to take care of than it is right there inside of you. Don't rush it!

Unknown

 

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

 

Everything in nature bespeaks the Mother

Unknown

 

Man is wise only while he searches for wisdom. If he thinks he has found it, he is a fool.

Rabbi Ibn Gevirol

 

Children are a heritage of the Lord; the fruit of the womb is his reward.

Psalm 127:3~ KJV

 

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

C.S. Lewis, from God in the Dock

 

Offer hugs, not drugs

Adina Lebowitz

 

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Anne Frank

 

Putting women in the position of coping with conflict when they should be concentrating on having their babies counted as an intervention in itself!

Unknown

 

- a plant in an inappropriate location is a weed

- a plant in an appropriate location is a flower

- an obstetric technique at an inappropriate time is an intervention

- an obstetric technique at an appropriate time is a godsend!

Unknown

 

It's the little things that matter most.

Gail Karlovsky

 

Faith, Acceptance, Surrender

Unknown

 

Fear can be overcome only by Faith.

Dr. Grantly Dick-Read

 

Birth is as safe as life gets.

Harriette Hartigan

 

My body knows just what to do. My baby grows just as it should be.

Penny Simkin

 

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature

Dr. Bradley

 

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

 

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.

Penelope Leach

 

I discovered I always have choices and sometimes it's only a choice of attitude.

Judith M. Knowlton

 

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

Diana Korte

 

...the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth...She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in the manger...

Luke 2: 6-7

 

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul...Even thought I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Psalm 23

 

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world: indeed it's the only thing that ever has!

Margaret Meade

 

When I am afraid, I will trust in you.

Psalm 56:3

 

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

 

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

 

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

  The Birthsong The night is still, the moon full and bright

She feels it approaching, her belly once again tight

All is in ready the time’s finally come

She’s hoping her baby will be here by the rising of the sun.

 

The song begins gently, moving slowly at first

The courage, the fear, the love, the hope and the mirth

Some sing quite softly and some loud and strong

Their babies emerge as they sing the Birthsong

 

Time becomes frozen as woman by woman, birth by birth

They’re all connected through their bodies & songs

It knows no boundaries, no color, no races

It fills all their bodies, their hearts, souls and faces.

The sounds of each woman as she sings the Birthsong

 

Her breathing grows faster as each new wave moves within

She remembers to let go, to surrender again

She opens her eyes and sees her partner, her lover, her friend

Remembering with tenderness their choice to begin

 

The song begins gently, moving slowly at first

The courage, the fear, the love and the hope

Some sing quite softly and some loud and strong

Their babies emerge as they sing the Birthsong

 

Time becomes frozen as woman by woman, birth by birth

They’re all connected through their bodies & songs

It knows no boundaries, no color, no races

It fills all their bodies, their hearts, souls and faces.

The sounds of each woman as she sings the Birthsong

 

The songs been completed the babe’s in her arms

Both teary eyed parents are moved by it’s charms

The song appears ended at least in this room

But I’ll hear it eternal with other bright moons.

 

The song begins gently, moving slowly at first

The courage, the fear, the love, the hope and the mirth

Some sing quite softly and some loud and strong

Their babies emerge as they sing the Birthsong

 

Time becomes frozen as woman by woman, birth by birth

They’re all connected through their bodies & songs

It knows no boundaries, no color, no races

It fills all their bodies, their hearts, souls and faces.

The sounds of each woman as she sings the Birthsong

 

Dawn Of your hand I could say this

a bird poised mid-air in flight

as delicate and smooth.

Of your mouth

a foxglove in its taking

without edges or hurt.

This of your ear

a tiny sea-horse, immortal

sporting in white waves

and of your eye

a place where no one could hide

nothing lurk.

Of your cupped flesh

smooth in my palm

an agate on the sea-shore.

Of your back and belly

that they command kisses.

And of your feet I would say

they are inquisitive and gay

as squirrels or birds

and so return to your hand

and begin my voyage

around your loveliness

again and yet again

as in my arms you lie sleeping.

Jeni Couzyn, South Africa

 

The Candle Imagine that your pelvis is a candle with a flame in the middle

As my contractions come, the flame burns brighter.

My body is the wax of the candle, warming and yielding to the flame.

The more I breathe, the brighter the candle burns.

The wax melts and drips with each contraction.

My body becomes looser and opens to the flame.

I see my pelvis becoming soft and warm and pliable.

I breathe. With each contraction, the candle becomes softer.

I melt with the candle.

My breath helps the candle burn brighter, melting quicker.

I remain soft, warm, and yielding.

Barbara Harper "Gentle Birth Choices"

 

The Rose My cervix is like a rosebud

Ready to Open

I am nurtured by those around me as the rose is nurtured by the soil

The rosebud gradually, ever so softly, opens and blossoms.

I open and blossom.

My cervix is soft and ripe like a rosebud.

I see the outer petals of te rose falling away

I see my cervix yielding like the outer petals of the rose.

Every contraction opens another petal of my rosebud cervix.

I welcome each contraction, which helps me open my rosebud cervix.

I welcome and receive all the nurturing around me, which helps me open.

Just like the warm sun opens the rose, the warmth I receive opens my cervix.

I yield and open.

The rose does not resist.

I open and blossom.

Barbara Harper "Gentle Birth Choices"

 

We've all been waiting for you.

For you.

Your arrival has been marked, has been recorded

on earth,

in the universe,

in the galaxies,

in all of space,

in all of time.

 

You come with a birthright, written in love and sung

through all Creation in words which promise

that no matter where you're at,

you're home

that no matter who you're with,

you're welcome

that no matter who you are,

you're loved.

Welcome.

        Rita Ramsey

Copyright © 1997-2007 Mother Care. All photos © Mother Care & Terri McKinney Photography. All rights reserved.