Jo Beverley Quotes

The best a health care system can do is to equip itself to meet the needs of each individual woman and birth. Those needs run the gamut from undisturbed home birth to planned cesarean section.

When 1970s feminism hit the United States, women demanded the right to natural childbirth and to have their husband or another support person in the delivery room. My mother gave birth to me during this time.

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

I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.

I wanted to deliver babies and become a midwife. I think childbirth is one of the most amazing things you could ever experience, and I loved working with people and seeing the joys in family when they welcome a new member to it. It really brought me joy to be around that.

From conception to delivery, it has been a great experience. I was determined to give a natural birth.

My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.

I wasn't scared of childbirth. I educated myself and did my fair share of research, and that made me feel a little more prepared.

Every Mother Counts is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother. We inform, engage, and mobilize audiences to take action and raise funds that support maternal health programs around the world.

You realize when you're pregnant how lucky you are to have access to medical care.

In some countries, as many as 91 percent of women have no one at their side to assist them during labor and delivery.

I was always interested in becoming a midwife. Then, at my own birth, I didn't get the support I'd hoped for, and that changed everything. That's why I became a doula. There's such a need.

I'm in training to become a midwife. I'm almost there and before I know it I'll be able to open my own practice, if that's what I desire.

Talking to women about birth can be polarizing.

Dying in childbirth is something that's not new; it's been going on for ages, and so it's not something that people focus on; it's not something that gets funded a lot, and it's exactly for that reason that we are losing mothers all the time, and we have kids with no mothers.

There's a saying in Africa: 'To find out you are pregnant is to have one foot in the grave.'

It's amazing what it opens up in women when you tell them you've just played a midwife.

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.

If birth matters, midwives matter. In Europe, there are hospitals where the cesarean rate is less than 10%, and you'll find midwives in these hospitals, you'll see a lot less re-admissions with infections and complications, and you'll see a lot less injury to mothers.

There was a woman in Tunisia called Madame Pinot. She was a midwife and had helped in the birth of my siblings and me. I assisted her. I helped women give birth to a lot of babies when I was very young.

All women need support when they're having their babies and their little families are in formation. I have to say I have a lot of concern about the numbers of women - and men, now - who are not getting the support that they need. There are not the families and the communities around that there used to be.

I like trying to get pregnant, I'm not so sure about childbirth.

Neither left nor right has focused adequately on maternal health.

How may child bearing women be most encouraged and supported in the time of childbearing?

Pregnancy is of course confined to women, but it is in other ways significantly different from the typical covered disease or disability.