Childbirth Quotes

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Remember this, for it is as true and true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.”
― Ina May Gaskin, Ina May's Guide to Childbirth

“They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of of, mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

“Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there's a god, because I'll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There's just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us.”
― Penn Jillette

“I could not get my fill of looking.
There should be a song for women to sing at this moment or a prayer to recite. But perhaps there is none because there are no words strong enough to name that moment.”
― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

“Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

“Having a baby is painful in order to show how serious a thing life is.”
― Lisa See, Shanghai Girls

“Later on Lady Maccon was to describe that particular day as the worst of her life. She had neither the soul nor the romanticism to consider childbirth magical or emotionally transporting. So far as she could gather it mostly involved pain indignity and mess. There was nothing engaging or appealing about the process. And as she told her husband firmly she intended never to go through it again.”
― Gail Carriger, Heartless

“Her eyes were open, taking in my tired face... Her face twitched into what looked like a squinty smile, and in her wordless expression I saw gratitude, and relief, and trust. I wanted, desperately, not to disappoint her.”
― Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers

“War and marriage and childbirth had passed over her without touching any deep chord within her and she was unchanged.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what every woman went through. Not that they got ripped apart, but they had no guarantees about whether they were going to live through it or not.
You know, I recently read - and I don't read nonfiction, generally - Becoming Jane Austen. That's the one subject that would get me to go out and read nonfiction. And the author's conclusion was that one of the reason's Jane Austen might not have married when she did have the opportunity...well, she watched her very dear nieces and friends die in childbirth! And it was like a death sentence: You get married and you will have children. You have children and you will die. (Laughs) I mean, it was a terrifying world.”
― Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide

“Men die in battle; women die in childbirth.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

“My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

“My friend Kathy is the only person who'll be halfway honest with me. 'Did you ever see a cowboy film, where someone has been caught by the Indians and tied between two wild stallions, each pulling in opposite directions?' she asked.

I nodded mutely.

'That's a bit what giving birth is like.”
― Marian Keyes, Under the Duvet: Shoes, Reviews, Having the Blues, Builders, Babies, Families and Other Calamities

“I cried with pride as I looked into the face of a midwife from the next generation of baby catchers.”
― Peggy Vincent, Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife

“Whose interest does egg freezing serve? The woman's or that of an ambitious, still pretty unforgiving culture that doesn't really ever see childbearing for female employees as convenient?”
― Randi Hutter Epstein, Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank

“I am often slow in catching up to the times, but even so, I still cannot even grip this idea: With nothing more than pitocin in your IV drip, you can sooner control the date and time of the birth of a human being-- the gushing entry into the great blue world of a whole new person-- than you can the scheduling of a few line cooks in your operation.”
― Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

“Vicky hated complicated births because the families never understood. They got angry, they blamed the doctors for the woman bleeding out, for the breached baby, or, in the best cases, for the emergency C-section. They didn't understand the simple explanation that these things happened, that it was nature, that women had died of childbirth for centuries. They couldn't understand that a birth wasn't some sacred experience, all that hocus pocus. These doctors ruining their bliss. She detested relatives.”
― Mariana Enríquez, Nuestra parte de noche

“She took the baby in her arms, holding it with such care and delicacy. The minute she laid eyes on the tiny, beautiful creature, she fell in love. Her heart swelled up. In that moment she knew what a mother’s unconditional love meant.”
― Patrick Macfarland, Fairy Tale of A Mexican Family

“Does it really hurt?' Ffion asked her mam. She'd read the books Elen had bought, had even watched that awful video in school, but she still found it hard to comprehend that -- in a matter of weeks -- there would be an actual baby coming out of her. 'Like, -really-?'

Elen stood, kissing her daughter fiercely on the forehead. 'You know the best antidote to pain?'

Ffion remembered the woman on the video. 'Is it an epidural?'

Elen laughed. 'It's love, Ffion Morgan. Love is the answer to everything.”
― Clare Mackintosh, The Last Party

“Twenty-eight now, she has given birth to a girl she wraps in a piece of the sky stolen from a clear day.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Her former tormenter has become her friend, her companion in a private world, which, until only a few days ago, was untainted by outside words and prying eyes. Her blood thins and begins to flow freely through her body, her mouth softens. She's no longer alone.”
― Sara Gallardo, Enero

“So I take it you’re not one of those women who wants to birth a basketball team?”
“I can think of nothing worse.”
― Chandra Blumberg, Stirring Up Love

“She took the baby in her arms, holding it with such care and delicacy. The minute she laid eyes
on the tiny, beautiful creature, she fell in love. Her heart swelled up. In that moment she knew what a mother’s unconditional love meant.”
― Patrick Macfarland, Fairy Tale of A Mexican Family

“At the onset of labor, the woman was placed in the lithotomy (supine) position, chloroformed, and turned into the completely passive body on which the obstetrician could perform as on a mannequin. The labor room became an operating theatre, and childbirth a medical drama with the physician as its hero.”
― Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“Maternal death during childbirth is not unique to humans, although it has long been accepted that humans have a somewhat unique situation of having to fit a large-headed infant through a narrow pelvis. This biological constraint, along with socio-economic and political issues, makes childbirth (except in the case of surrogacy) a potentially dangerous event that women must face if they wish to be evolutionarily successful.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“It was more than a miracle, it was the imagination of the Creator wrapped in the skin of a newborn babe.”
― Connilynn Cossette

“How glorious it is that we can create this. The responsibility and the curse. This power that belongs to only your body. This love that is unlike the love you have for your partner. It is a love that comes from within you, that you alone create. Unconditional. A word so overused it’s lost its true meaning. Without condition, endless, Christ-like. What a terrible grief it is to love even when you do not want to love; a hole is carved within you, and you become emptied of everything you have to give. Loving this child becomes your singular focus. You deaden against everything else.”
― Elle Nash, Deliver Me

“The scroll slowed on a post from Madison. Predictably, she was sharing more pregnancy content. Today's post was a column graph about maternal mortality rates, accompanied by the caption:

This makes me so sad. Growing a human is hard enough. We shouldn't have to fear for our lives on top of that.

Mae frowned. The graph was cut off. It showed rates for All, White, and Hispanic, but there was a sliver of what looked like another bar on the far right. Under it, the only part of the word that didn't get cut off was Bl.
Ordinarily, Mae wouldn't have wasted any time on this. It was just Madison being Madison, thinking of herself and no one else. But after learning about her grandma Doris's racist past yesterday, it was hard to look past anything about the Parkers anymore.
A reverse-image search turned up the original article, titled Black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. The full graph showed that the column for Black women towered over the other columns Madison had posted.
Anger and annoyance rising within her, Mae returned to Madison's post and started typing.

You'll be fine. If you'd read the article and shared the full graph, you'd know the point of the piece is that Black women are way more at risk. Or do you not care about that?”
― Shauna Robinson, The Townsend Family Recipe for Disaster