Quotes & Sayings About Pregnancy And Childbirth

The day of birth is a sacred day. — Lailah Gifty Akita

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

Men need women. Women need men. — Lailah Gifty Akita

For war to man, like childbirth to women, is simplifying in its emotions and activities. All the real problems of life can be put aside while the one thing is done and little thought is needed to do it ... His hatreds can be expressed without censure, he can let his emotions run free, he can behave as dramatically, as heroically as he likes, and no one laughs at him. It is almost impossible for a man to behave heroically in the cool and ordinary times of peace. But in war anything is allowed him, he is praised and applauded and made much of, as women are excused and allowed for in pregnancy. — Pearl S. Buck

Pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict women's ability to participate in society on equal footing with men. — Katha Pollitt

The holy time establish the holy-event. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Any references to pregnancy or childbirth are coarse, and should be carefully side-stepped by the truly well-bred, as should intrusive comments on love-affairs. — Josephine Ross

Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild - and what happened? The men wilted. — Erica Jong

The health of your future kids does not start with their birth - it starts with you, right now, well before you plan to impregnate your wife. — Pratik Patil

I realize why women die in childbirth - it's preferable. — Sherry Glaser

I am not finding pregnancy much of a joy. I am afraid of childbirth, but I am afraid I can't find a way of avoiding it. — Brigitte Bardot

Holy moment is a sacred existence. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Pregnancy, childbirth, healing and old age all required gee force. No amount of gengineering by the Biomistresses of the great stations could circumvent that inescapable evolutionary fact. — Jay Lake

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

Children see beauty in everything. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The World Health Organization estimates that 536,000 women perished in pregnancy or childbirth in 2005, a toll that has barely budged in thirty years. Child mortality has plunged, longevity has increased, but childbirth remains almost as deadly as ever, with one maternal death every minute. Some 99 percent of these deaths occur in poor countries. — Nicholas D. Kristof And Sheryl WuDunn

Children are lovable and adorable. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I will hold my babies in my hand at sacred-time. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It's the strangest feeling at the end of pregnancy: you look down at this huge belly and try to imagine how some little person, whom you haven't even met, is going to emerge from it any day and completely change your lives. First, you wonder how this pregnancy, to which you've grown so accustomed over much of the last year, can, with barely any notice, come to an abrupt end. Then you try to fathom how this baby is ever going to come out; your bowling ball stomach seems misproportioned for what lies between it and the outside world. And only then do you realize what it all means-that the easy part, pregnancy, is almost over, and it's time to gear up for the tough stuff: childbirth! — Lise Eliot

FACT: Women are up to five times more likely than men to have urinary incontinence problems, primarily due to trauma the body experiences during pregnancy and childbirth. — Cary McNeal

As indicated by the increase in maternal mortality in 2010, right now it's more dangerous to give birth in California than in Kuwait or Bosnia. Amnesty International reports that women in [the United States] have a higher risk of dying due to pregnancy complications than women in forty-nine other countries (black women are almost four times as likely to die as white women). The United States spends more than any other country on maternal health care, yet our risk of dying or coming close to death during pregnancy or in childbirth remains unreasonably high. — Jessica Valenti

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

Because they've either conveniently forgotten with time or they're trying to be supportive, most mothers won't tell you how hard pregnancy (and then childbirth) can be. Let me tell you, it is. It's brutal sometimes! But, if I did it, ANYONE can do it. I mean, I always knew I was meant to do something really BIG in life, and now I know that this was it. Screw winning an Academy Award someday ... I GAVE BIRTH — Jenny McCarthy

In the end, abortion is an issue of fundamental human rights. To force women to undergo pregnancy and childbirth against their will is to deprive them of the right to make basic decisions about their lives and well-being, and to give that power to the state. — Katha Pollitt

Thousands of women could be saved each year if they had access to skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth, and access to emergency obstetric care. Most of the interventions they need are simple, affordable, and highly effective. — Lee Jong-wook

No other natural bodily function is painful and childbirth should not be an exception — Grantly Dick-Read

Nobody asks about Beethoven's mother's own life - a fairly miserable round of pregnancy, childbirth, and child death. Was Maria Magdalena Keverich van Beethoven put on earth only to produce her wunderkind? Might she have had gifts of her own that she never got to offer the world? — Katha Pollitt

Perhaps all the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in the early years wouldn't — Laura Moriarty

When one begins, as I did, to analyze men after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling. — Karen Horney

I was pregnable once," Merill thought to contribute. She remembered how troublesome it made getting around, having a ripe belly. Couldn't roll properly, couldn't hop properly, couldn't romp or flop properly. There were the cravings for roasted cabbage - she loathed cabbage, with its leaves and growing in rows. And labor! Merill passed out during childbirth. She'd endured burns, lacerations, rips, serrated teeth, nails, hooks and a trove of unmentionable harm-inflictors. Labor trounced them all and wriggled gleefully in the spray of blood and gore. "Being pregnable is no good. No good at all. Like growing a bitter melon in your belly. — Darrell Drake

With this pregnancy, unlike my others, I was fully aware of the possibility of blissful, painless, potentially even orgasmic, and fully natural, unmedicalized childbirth from the beginning. After reaching my second trimester, I was relaxing in the bath after my children had gone to sleep, when suddenly I felt a profound connection with the little girl within me. She communicated to me how this birth was going to go. How it was going to feel. In essence, I knew she would pass easily out of my body. — Adrienne Carmack

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

Birthday is a glorious day. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Discrimination and multiple deprivations of human rights are also frequently part of the problem, sentencing entire populations to poverty ... It is surely a matter of outrage that over half a million women die annually from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. This is nearly half the annual global death toll, and arguably, a direct reflection of the disempowerment of women in social, economic and political life. — Navi Pillay

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

Isn't it wonderful to give birth to your own kind? — Lailah Gifty Akita

It does appear that in some other cultures the work of motherhood is not left entirely up to one person the way it is here, so a baby can be handed around to many relatives, which gives the mother some blessed relief. Our society tends to elevate pregnancy and childbirth to unrealistic romantic heights then leave women on their own to struggle with the task, making them wonder what they are doing wrong when at times it all seems too much. — Robin Barker

The sacred-time will hold my babies in my hand. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The frequency of personal questions grows in direct proportion to your increasing girth ... No one would ask a man such a personally invasive question as "Is your wife having natural childbirth or is she planning to be knocked out?" But someone might ask that of you. No matter how much you wish for privacy, your pregnancy is a public event to which everyone feels invited. — Jean Marzollo