Best Midwife Quotes & Sayings

And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone. — Caitlin Moran

Workers of lungless labs- when dying
Will you be proud you were midwife
To implements exemplifying
Assaults against the heart of life?
You knew their purpose, yet you made them.
If you had scruples, you betrayed them.
What pastoral response acquits
Those who made ovens for Auschwitz?
Indeed it is said that the banality
Of evil is its greatest shock.
It jokes. It punches its time clock,
Plays with its kids. The triviality
Of slaughtering millions can't impinge
Upon its peace, or make it cringe. — Vikram Seth

When a woman births, not only is a baby being born but so is a mother.
How we treat her will affect how she feels about herself as a mother
and as a parent.
Be gentle. Be kind. Listen. — Ruth Ehrhardt

One of the obvious implications is that a person will have to face the fact that she cannot meet other people's expectations. This signals the end of what might be called the "camel" phase of human development. I believe it was Nietschze who suggested that for the first part of life, we are camels, trudging through the desert, accepting on our backs everybody's "shoulds" and "don'ts." Camels only know how to spit; they don't think for themselves or talk back. As the camel dies, a lion is born in its place. Lions discover both their roar and the art of preening. The lion may be a little shaky at first, so support and encouragement are vital. But once the camel begins to die (e.g., signaled by depression), there is no turning back. Symptoms occupy the space between the death of the camel and the birth of the lion. A therapist can be a good midwife during this liminal phase. — Stephen Gilligan

I was born in Tyrone, 1956, for something I didn't do. I was innocent. But they gave me life. I still remember the midwife who extradited me. — Kevin McAleer

A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself. — Terry Teachout

Anna and I did not make love. I don't remember why. Maybe we didn't need to. She might have been afraid, although I doubt she was afraid of much. She'd been a midwife before she opened a studio; she'd held life in her hands, like a wire from a galvanic cell. Maybe death was too strong in me for an act so inspirited with life. Although I sometimes think that death is what gives lovemaking its desperate and terrible joy. — Norman Lock

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored. — Deborah Harkness

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined. — George Saunders

The sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth. — Dervla Murphy

She was not as stupid as some I have had, and better company, but still perhaps her going was for the best. She was not what I needed."
"Because I failed," whispered Alyce in the shadows.
"Because she gave up," continued the midwife. "I need an apprentice who can do what I tell her, take what I give her, who can try and risk and fail and try again and not give up ... — Karen Cushman

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. — Ina May Gaskin

We should work to guarantee that there is a midwife or health worker by every woman's side during childbirth. — Liya Kebede

Today, the lay midwife is a response to a growing home-birth movement. In my own community most physicians have decided to withhold prenatal care from the home-birther. This is judgmental and vindictive. These doctors have decided that home birth is not safe, and by withholding prenatal care they are doing their best to make sure it is unsafe. Often it is lay midwives who step forward to fill the void and help eliminate the unnecessary dangers of home birth. They are essential for screening out women who really should not have a home birth. For considerably less money than a physician charges, they spend many more hours with a pregnant woman before, during, and after the birth. and in most places they courageously face the opposition of the established medical community. — Susan McCutcheon

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain. — Clifton Fadiman

When you are in hard labor, remember that the length of labor is usually proportional to the number of people around. Avoid the presence of anybody who might release adrenaline. The best situation I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody else around than an experienced, motherly and silent midwife who does not behave like a guide or an observer. — Michel Odent

My dear boy, in Ireland the midwife uses one hand to hold the baby's best fighting arm from the font water, and grips its jaws with the other lest the goes to litigation about it. Says O'LiamRoe — Dorothy Dunnett

Odd that you should choose to be a midwife, having never experienced birth yourself." In other circumstances the words would have stung. She thought, Do not physicians provide medicaments for illnesses they have never suffered? — Roberta Rich

There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation. — Naomi Klein

Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make. — Helen Varney

Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war. — Jeane Kirkpatrick

You aren't better than your fellow midwife, and together in numbers you're stronger. — L.A. Casey

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

Madame Lefoux acted as midwife. In her scientific way, she was unexpectedly adept at the job. When the infant finally appeared, she held it up for Alexia to see, rather proudly, as though she'd done all the hard work herself. 'Goodness,' said an exhausted Lady Maccon, 'are babies customarily that repulsive looking? — Gail Carriger

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! — John Heider

The task of the mediator is to help the parties to open difficult issues and nudge them forward in the peace process. The mediator's role combines those of a ship's pilot, consulting medical doctor, midwife and teacher. — Martti Ahtisaari

When she was pregnant with her second child, a midwife asked if Catherine had any unspoken fears about anything that could go wrong with the baby - such as genetic defects or complications during the birth. My sister said, 'My only fear is that he might grow up to become a Republican. — Elizabeth Gilbert

We are meant to midwife dreams for one another. Success occurs in clusters — Julia Cameron

You come to this place, mid-life. You don't know how you got here, but suddenly you're staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn't. When the midwife says, 'It's a boy,' where does the girl go? When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. — Hilary Mantel

alcohol played the midwife — James Branch Cabell

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools ... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. — H.L. Mencken

She sold her hair; she sold her teeth, but it was never enough. The baby became lethargic and ceased to thrive. She called it "wasting fever".
When the baby died no money could be spared for burial, so she sealed him in an orange box weighed down with stones, and slipped him into the river.
That furtive journey in the middle of the night with her dead baby was the moment when she finally accepted defeat, and knew that the inevitable had come. She and the children would have to go to the workhouse.". — Jennifer Worth

Hitchcock's debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family's North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock's story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant.
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY — Publishers Weekly

How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife? — Sue Monk Kidd

We are now witnessing, after the slow fermentation of fifty years, a concentration of technical power aimed at the essential determinants of heredity, development and disease. This concentration is made possible by the common function of nucleic acids as the molecular midwife of all reproductive particles. Indeed it is the nucleic acids which, in spite of their chemical obscurity, are giving to biology a unity which has so far been lacking, a chemical unity. — C.D. Darlington

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife. — John Dewey

Which Cromwell was, as the chief engineer of Henry's Reformation. He crushed the Roman church, looted the monasteries and nationalized faith by subordinating clergy to king. That may flatter today's reflexive anticlericalism. But we do well to remember that the centralized state Cromwell helped midwife did prepare the ground, over the coming centuries, — Anonymous

The king as the father or midwife, taking care of children. This made real families less necessary. Everyone was equal with one another and all were citizens of the state. The state protected as many aspects of life as was possible, from the wages of the workers to the welfare of those who could not work. It took the pressure off immediate families to shoulder each other's burdens. The king would take care of them. They would simply ship their aged and infirm off to government communes, so they could get back to maximizing their service for the collective. — Brian Godawa