Natural Birthing Quotes & Sayings

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

Sharing secrets is the way in which women tie themselves together, for it reveals complicity and trust. Holding secrets shows trustworthiness and a sort of quite defiance. It is a natural thing for a female to hold secrets within her breast until the time is ripe to release them. Does it not follow the way in which her body is formed? A woman is made with that dark and mysterious recess that can grow a child safely until the child is ready to come out onto the birthing bed. And like birthing, secrets present themselves in many ways. some slip easily into the world, others must be torn out, if the body is unwilling. — Kathleen Kent

The greatest mischief of medicine has occurred because life was not honored. Women have been robbed of the glory of their own bodies with, in recent times, removal and mutilation of reproductive organs and breasts, and the treatment of natural passages of life -- birthing, menstruation, menopause -- as disease. — Jeanne Achterberg

Drugs and medical technology can be enormously beneficial when used to take care of real complications, but too often they are abused when applied to women birthing normally. These women are thus subjected to unnecessary risks. The key to this problem is informed consent, an ideal too seldom realized. Informed consent means that no woman during pregnancy or labor should ever be deceived into thinking that any drug or procedure (Demerol, Seconal, spinals, caudals, epidurals, paracervical block, etc.) is guaranteed safe. Not only are there no guaranteed safe drugs, but many of them have well-known, recognized side effects and potential side effects.
Informed consent should mean that no woman would ever hear such falsehoods as, "This is harmless," or, "I only give it in such a small dose that it can't affect the baby," or, "This is just a local and won't reach the baby. — Susan McCutcheon

Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The cause I am most passionate about is natural birthing. I had my son at home, and it was the most primal, intuitive, empowering, and loving experience I've ever had. — Zoe McLellan