quotations about childbirth
Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers? But of course, there is no way to tell this or to hear it. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you have no idea how death stands in the corner, ready to play his part. Until you are the woman on the bricks, you do not know the power that rises from other women.
ANITA DIAMANT
The Red Tent
You do have control over some elements of childbirth, and the plans made leading up to birth are important. The process of thinking through your options and making plans can help you make better choices and set yourself up for success--whatever that means for you.
MEGAN DAVIDSON
Your Birth Plan: A Guide to Navigating All of Your Choices in Childbirth
I have personally come to believe that childbirth is a blessing to women sent straight from God. I mean, in its purest form, birth is the most fantastic orgasm married with a miracle! What more heavenly gift could there be?
LAURIE ANNIS MORGAN
The Power of Pleasurable Childbirth
The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him.
MARGARET MITCHELL
Gone with the Wind
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.
JANET FITCH
White Oleander
This was my first baby. I thought I knew what to expect. I thought I could handle the pain without drugs. I thought giving birth was comparative to running a marathon. I thought a lot of things that ended up being wrong. First, childbirth was nothing like running a marathon. The fatigue was similar, but I'd never felt like my stomach was being turned inside out while running. Even the combination of every side stitch I'd ever had while running didn't compare to the pain of one single contraction.
BRIANA N. RENSHAW
"A Laboring Question"
She had neither the soul nor the romanticism to consider childbirth magical or emotionally transporting. So far as she could gather it mostly involved pain indignity and mess.
GAIL CARRIGER
Heartless
Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions ... that's a bit what giving birth is like.
MARIAN KEYES
Under the Duvet
Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!
FULTON J. SHEEN
Seven Words of Jesus and Mary
Lying on my side dressed in a thin cotton gown, staring intently at the logo on the hospital bed, contraction after contraction wracked my body. As my stomach clenched, I finally understood why all the media and literature stressed breathing during childbirth. The pain of my contractions was so incredible, my entire body froze tight, including my lungs. So I gripped the bedrails tightly and focused on breathing.
BRIANA N. RENSHAW
"A Laboring Question"
There are two most powerful days in your life: the day you're born, and the day you discover why.
BONIFACE MWANGI
"The day I stood up alone", TEDGlobal, 2014
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
KATHLEEN OSSIP
The Do-Over
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.
INA MAY GASKIN
Ina May's Guide to Childbirth
Men die in battle; women die in childbirth.
PHILIPPA GREGORY
The Red Queen
War and marriage and childbirth had passed over her without touching any deep chord within her and she was unchanged.
MARGARET MITCHELL
Gone with the Wind
It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course.... I tremble with indignation when I think of ... the unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.
ISADORA DUNCAN
My Life
I had no idea how we were going to figure this out, but women had been having babies since the beginning of time without doctors. Couldn't be that hard, right? I sort of wanted to punch myself in the face after that though. Childbirth scared the crap out of me.
JENNIFER L. ARMENTROUT
Origin
Natural childbirth allows the hormones that have been working for women for thousands of years to fulfill their functions. This is more important than just helping a woman through labor and delivery. Birth-related hormones also affect well-being much later in life.
JANET SCHWEGEL
Adventures in Natural Childbirth
As some divinely gifted man,
Whose life in low estate began,
And on a simple village green;
Who breaks his birth's invidious bar.
ALFRED TENNYSON
In Memoriam A.H.H.
Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
GLORIA STEINEM
Ms. Magazine, April 1981