Midwifery Quotes & Sayings

Many midwives work as employees in large hospital practices, where the techno-medical model of care is still the rule. In practices like these, midwives are used to attract women who desire midwifery care, but they may in fact be under constant pressure to practice within the techno-medical mode. — Ina May Gaskin

Abortion politics have distracted all sides from what is really essential: a major aid campaign to improve midwifery, prenatal care and emergency obstetric services in poor countries. — Nicholas D. Kristof

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

Nobody wants to see the village of the happy people. — Lew Hunter

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

I've cut myself out ... I've cut scenes out that I was in and that's when you realize that you've got to make the best movie you can. — Jon Favreau

If you are inherently a good guy, which I think I am, you instinctively want to help people even before you know what their problem may be. Which, as I examine that notion, makes good guys sound gullible. Con artists look for good guys because of that built-in gullibility. If they're con artists that come in a sexually alluring package, a good guy can become a brainless idiot. Allow me to introduce myself. — Dan Skinner

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. — Ina May Gaskin

Ina May Gaskin is the most important person in maternity care in North America, bar none. — Marsden Wagner

One way to measure a particular doctor's openness and attitude toward women in general is simply to ask about the doctor's opinion of midwifery. — Marsden Wagner

I think the messiness and embodied nature of modern life just produces an enhanced signal for our attention. — Richard Davidson

These arent your mother's zombies! — Joe McKinney

The good thing about 'SNL' is that it's the same people every week that you're working with, and we've all become so close and tight because we've worked together so long and so closely together. — Kristen Wiig

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

The midwife considers the miracle of childbirth as normal, and leaves it alone unless there's trouble. The obstetrician normally sees childbirth as trouble; if he leaves it alone, it's a miracle. — Sheila Stubbs

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

15. WHENEVER I WENT OUT TO PLAY, MY MOTHER WANTED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I WAS GOING TO BE
When I'd come in, she'd call me into her bedroom, take me in her arms, and cover me with kisses. She'd stroke my hair and say, 'I love you so much,' and when I sneezed she'd say, 'Bless you, you know how much I love you, don't you?' and when I got up for a tissue she'd say, 'Let me get that for you I love you so much,' and when I looked for a pen to do my homework she'd say, 'Use mine, anything for you,' and when I had an itch on my leg she'd say, 'Is this the spot, let me hug you,' and when I said I was going up to my room she'd call after me, 'What can I do for you I love you so much,' and I always wanted to say, but never said: Love me less. — Nicole Krauss

The noblest of ideas have always been protected by warriors. — Tom Clancy

And how are . . . Mummy's stitches? This, I was slightly thrown by. I knew my mother had had forty-two stitches after the birth, and that she was washing the stitches every day with warm salty water - she made me go and get the warm salty water - but she hadn't passed on much more information about her vagina than that. I knew from Spiritual Midwifery (Ina May Gaskin, Book Pub Co., 1977) that postpartum women were often loath to share the details of their births with the virgins of the tribe, so I wasn't unduly concerned about it. Still, I did have some info, and I was going to share it. — Caitlin Moran

Ireland was a different place after the famine. The population was drastically reduced - an island of 8.2 million people in 1841 was reduced to 6 million in 1851. At least 1 million of those people had died. The rest fled the country, hoping for a new life in another land. — Ryan Hackney

She didn't just walk on the wild side,
she lived there, dancing in the streets
and setting fire to its sky. — J. Iron Word

28Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we lmay serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. — Anonymous

Once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her. — John Vanbrugh

Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic - work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don't let the lies fence you in or hold you back. — Sarah Bessey

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. — Ina May Gaskin

Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all. — Jennifer Worth

If women lose the right to say where and how they birth their children, then they will have lost something that's as dear to life as breathing. — Ami McKay

I dream that someday I will meet her and that thought brings tears to my eyes, still. I imagine her in my mind and I dream of that moment. — Julie Watson

I pitched my voice for Dirty Harry, but it was more Lisping Baggins. — David Mitchell

I think midwifery was developed by people with common sense, people who were close to nature, and people who observed other species of mammals and saw that there were lessons there to be learned. — Ina May Gaskin

The truth is, I hate not being the first person narrator all the way through! To paraphrase David Copperfield, I don't know whether I'm the hero or the victim of this tale. But either way, shouldn't I dominate it? — Anne Rice

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

But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave. — William Wordsworth

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing. — Herman Melville

When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed. — Henry De Vere Stacpoole

The techno-medical model of maternity care, unlike the midwifery model, is comparatively new on the world scene, having existed for barely two centuries. This male-derived framework for care is a product of the industrial revolution. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects. Pregnancy and labor are seen as illnesses, which, in order not to be harmful to mother or baby, must be treated with drugs and medical equipment. Within the techno-medical model of birth, some medical intervention is considered necessary for every birth, and birth is safe only in retrospect. — Ina May Gaskin

There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we — Ina May Gaskin