Midwifery Quotes

How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife?

My mother was a midwife and a herbalist, so we would go on these long walks, looking for yarrow or rosehips or whatever she needed to make her tinctures.

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.

I love 'Call the Midwife'; it's an absolute gem of a programme. Filming the Christmas special and then the second series felt like going back to a boarding school that you really love and is full of friends.

I'm obsessed with that show 'Call The Midwife'. Although I had to take a break at a certain point in my pregnancy because every episode is about having babies.

In 26 years of delivering babies, I've always been interested in government and the state of the union.

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.

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.

Simply put, when there is no home birth in a society, or when home birth is driven completely underground, essential knowledge of women’s capacities in birth is lost to the people of that society—to professional caregivers, as well as to the women of childbearing age themselves.

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.

We found a great rhythm. Contractions started kicking in. I sat there with her, right between her legs. We got tribal on it, we danced to it! I was DJ-ing this Brazilian music.

I always thought my alternative life, if I wasn't acting, would be to become a midwife. I love women. I want to help them exist.

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

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.

Birth: The first and direst of all disasters.

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.

I was stillborn. The midwives laid me aside, thought I was really gone. I laid there about an hour, and they picked me back up and tried again, 'cause my body was still warm. The Good Lord brought me back.

In any operation, what you have to do is to persuade the patient to grant access to the patient's energy. The purest form of that is when you're trying to help a woman through labor: when you're saying, 'Push, push!' and you're rhythmically with the woman.

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.

When Baby Boomer women started choosing hotel-like birthing centers over hospital delivery rooms, hospitals quickly wised up. Now even rural hospitals offer well-designed labor-delivery-recovery suites.

I'd be just as happy being a midwife. That's my ideal job.

Fo' Gawd, Miss Scarlett! We's got ter have a doctah. Ah- Ah- Miss Scarlett, Ah doan know nuthin' 'bout bringin' babies. -Prissy

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.

Talking to women about birth can be polarizing.

I'm obsessed with 'Call The Midwife.'