Ina May Gaskin Quotes

I had a home birth because I really believe in the body's natural ability to give birth. The medical profession has kind of warped women's minds into thinking we don't know how to birth and we need doctors and epidurals and Pitocin.

[On home births:] In a house where there had been three people, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.

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.

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

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.

A home birth is about being able to create exactly what you want, because it's such a violent moment inside of the body that you want everything else to be as beautiful as it can be.

I taught woman-centered childbirth classes for five years and have a particular interest in the history of childbirth practices.

Giving birth was the most amazing thing I've ever done. I'd been living in a Third World country, and I said, 'I'm going to just squat behind a tree.' I basically did that but in a chair in my living room. I didn't want a sterile hospital room. I didn't want doctors. I had a midwife.

I had both my children at home. It came naturally to me.

When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does yoga, and maybe drives a VW microbus.

Your forties is not the time to be thinking about getting pregnant.

In the spring of 1978, when my parents were 23, my mother gave birth to me on their friend Robert's farm in Oregon with the help of two midwives. The labor and delivery took three hours, start to finish.

When I read history, I [see] what typically happens to presidents and the other party during tumultuous times and how people react when the economy is collapsing and they're losing their homes, losing their pensions - it sort of tracks, what ended up happening, because some of that is human nature.

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.

Women are being told to get midwives [in UK] because there's not enough room and there's not enough pain medicine at the hospitals.

We need to protect the same amount of cognitive liberty in an age where you can invade people's thoughts without physically intruding into their homes than you did at the time of the framing.

The success of family welfare depends on giving women complete freedom with their lives. The need of the hour is that people should plan their families as per their convenience and get the bare minimum health facilities.

Nothing I have accomplished has given me more confidence than birthing my children at home naturally. I was so high after delivering my children-not just because I had a new baby, but because I was so proud of what my body (and mind) were able to do. I strongly encourage women not to give this power away.

I think it's important to balance out what people see today as normal birth, in a hospital room, flat on their backs, usually with an IV and a fetal monitor hooked up to them. That does happen, but other things are possible.

I'm 47 now, and I'm at that stage where I'm still young but I'm not young. I'm not old but I'm getting old, and I have stuff at home that reminds me of people and places.

I wanted to give birth as opposed to being delivered!

I think there's definitely much more opportunities for women now to find a role in 30s and 40s both. I think you're starting to find people really seeing that - here's the thing. It's hard for me to say and know the experience how it was ten, twenty years ago because I was only in my teens and my 20s, but I know from watching TV myself and watching film myself I see a lot more 30s and 40s on screen, which just makes me very, very happy. It's what we should be watching.

They say there are only two kinds of people on St. Patrick's Day: the Irish, and the people that drive them home.

One of the problems and the reason why Carolyn [Maloney ] wrote the book, the Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated is that some people think we have made it when we have not and there's much to be done.

Maybe I'm getting to the age when I'm starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now. You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot - both on the Right and the Left.