Midwife Quotes

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

“Failing to listen to the woman is one of the biggest mistakes a practitioner can make.”
― Helen Varney

“When a woman births, not only is a baby being born but so is a mother.
How we treat her will affect how she feels about herself as a mother
and as a parent.
Be gentle. Be kind. Listen.”
― Ruth Ehrhardt, The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour

“The baby, when he or she is ready to be born,
will send a message that tells the mother’s body that it is ready.
The mother’s body can then begin labour by slowly releasing oxytocin, the hormone of love.
The mother and baby work together to bring the baby into the world.”
― Ruth Ehrhardt, The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour

“Now the judge on his midnight rounds was passing along at just this place stark naked himself - such encounters being commoner than men suppose or who would survive any crossing by night - and he stepped into the river and seized up the drowning it, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“My dear boy, in Ireland the midwife uses one hand to hold the baby's best fighting arm from the font water, and grips its jaws with the other lest the goes to litigation about it. Says O'LiamRoe”
― Dorothy Dunnett

“When robots reproduce, man will become the midwife in his own society.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“My wife," he said eventually, slowly, as if it pained him to speak the words. "She nearly died in childbed, delivering our son. A wise woman in our village saved both their lives. Beatrice, she was called. I said nothing, when they accused her. She was hanged."
He took a velvet pouch from his breeches and pressed it into my hands, before melting away into the throng.
I looked inside the pouch and saw gold coins. I understood, then, that I had this man---or the woman who saved his family---to thank for my life.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“With the warm glow from the hearth and the candles scattered about the room, she looks like something out of a Renaissance painting. Pink cheeks and round body. Every so often, I tend a patient who makes the act of birth a thing of beauty. they make it look like what it really is, at its most elemental -- right and natural -- and I cannot help but marvel.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River