Home Birth Quotes

“There's a big difference between an intervention that's introduced or suggested due to a true medical need - or even by your request - and one that's due to impatience; a difference between someone saying "We're noticing this, let's discuss your options as well as our recommendations and reasons" and "We're noticing this, and you have to do this." In the first case, a care provider gives information and wants to talk options; in the second, the care provider uses fear and shaming to coerce the decision they want. Having a working, respectful, and good relationship with your care provider can make all the difference here, but so can your clarity about this one thing: you deserve respect, options, and support. If you are feeling pressured into an intervention, if you are feeling guilted into an intervention, if you are feeling ignored, disrespected, or embarrassed in any way, as if you need to make a certain choice to please other people in the room, this is not good care and you need a second opinion - or a new care provider.”
― January Harshe, Birth Without Fear: The Judgment-Free Guide to Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum

“He watched her pace the floor in her bare feet---the floor she'd scrubbed clean seven times now from the mess and afterbirth of new babies.

She'd gotten out the stains [...] in the floor she was pacing now, walking up and down the ordinary wooden boards with bare feet like Moses at the burning bush. Like something sacred had happened there; holy ground.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Oh, time and again, Mrs. Drinker told me that one had to have a doctor and one had to go to a hospital to have a baby. I was finally persuaded to make one concession: the doctor. But go to a hospital--that was ridiculous. Why? What for? I wasn't sick.
In Europe you went to a hospital when you were dangerously sick, and many people died there, but babies were born at home.
Would they in the hospital allow my husband to sit at my bed-side? Could I hold his hand, look into his eyes? Could my family be in the next room, singing and praying? The answer to all these questions was “nо."
All right, that settled it. I tried to explain that a baby had to be born into a home, received by loving hands, not into a hospital, surrounded by ghostly-looking doctors and masked nurses, into the atmosphere of sterilizers and antiseptics. That's why I would ask the doctor to come to our house.”
― Maria Augusta von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Siingers