Pregnancy Quotes

“She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother's song.”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter

“Being a critical thinker starts with resisting the urge to be a pleaser.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Some people have made some mistakes … and some mistakes have made some people.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Life keeps on making the terrible mistake of making impatient people capable of making children.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“The baby wasn't supposed to remind her of an internal mass of pooling waste.”
― Zoje Stage, Baby Teeth

“I want you to know that you were wanted. I decided: I wanted you.

Yi Ba thought that only men could do what they wanted, but he was wrong. I stood with my toes in the ocean, euphoric at how far I had come, and two months later, when I gave birth to you, I would feel accomplished, tougher than any man.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“Eddie turned away.
"Because I saved you, as tough as those years were for you, as bad as it was with your hand, you got to grow up, too. And because you got to grow up..."
When he turned back, Annie froze. Eddie was holding a baby boy, with a small blue cap on his head.
"Laurence?" Annie whispered.
Eddie stepped forward and placed her son in her trembling arms. Instantly, Annie was whole again, her body complete. She cradled the infant against her chest, a motherly cradle that filled her with the purest feeling. She smiled and wept and she could not stop weeping.
"My baby," she gushed. "Oh, my baby, my baby...”
― Mitch Albom, The Next Person You Meet in Heaven

“Many of us are failed secret attempts to keep our parents together.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The first movements of the fetus produce this sense of the splitting subject; the fetus's movements are wholly mine, completely within me, condition my experience and space. Only I have access to these movements from their origin, as it were. For months only I can witness this life within me, and it is only under my direction of where to put their hands that others can feel these movements. I have a privileged relation to this other life, not unlike that which I have to my dreams and thoughts, which I can tell someone but which cannot be an object for both of us in the same way... Pregnancy challenges the integration of my body experience by rendering fluid the boundary between what is within, myself, and what is outside, separate. I experience my insides as the space of another, yet my own body.”
― Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays

“all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“The task of the cervix is to stay closed, to make an impenetrable wall protecting the fetus, for approximately forty weeks of a pregnancy. After that, by means of labor, the wall must somehow become an opening. This happens through dilation, which is not a shattering, but an extreme thinning.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“This sounded good — I like physical experiences that involve surrender. I didn’t know, however, very much about experiences that demand surrender — that run over you like a truck, with no safe word to stop it. I was ready to scream, but labor turned out to be the quietest experience of my life.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“We've never crossed paths before. I've never seen you walking down the street. I don't know the first thing there is to know about you. And the lines of my palm do not reveal nor disclose any untold secrets.

Yet, here I am, holding the door as I whisper in your ear:

"I'll be right across the street when you're done, my child.”
― Malak El Halabi

“Most kids would not respect their parents as much as they do, or even at all, if they knew how intellectually undemanding is the role they played in their creation.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The sacred power of divine spirit transcends space and time.”
― Shawn A. Tassone, Spiritual Pregnancy: Develop, Nurture & Embrace the Journey to Motherhood

“Many women describe the feeling of having a baby come out of their vagina as taking the biggest shit of their lives. This isn’t really a metaphor. The anal cavity and vaginal canal lean on each other; they, too, are the sex which is not one. Constipation is one of pregnancy’s principal features: the growing baby literally deforms and squeezes the lower intestines, changing the shape, flow, and plausibility of one’s feces. In late pregnancy, I was amazed to find that my shit, when it would finally emerge, had been deformed into Christmas tree ornament — type balls. Then, all through my labor, I could not shit at all, as it was keenly clear to me that letting go of the shit would mean the total disintegration of my perineum, anus, and vagina, all at once. I also knew that if, or when, I could let go of the shit, the baby would probably come out. But to do so would mean falling forever, going to pieces.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

“The challenge we face is in being unapologetic about our desires and decisions and in not judging other women's choices. It is in rechanneling the anger, guilt, and shame that we often encounter into creating a culture that no longer conflates the word woman with mother and the word mother with sacrifice.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“The integrity of my body is undermined in pregnancy not only by this externality of the inside, but also by the fact that the boundaries of my body are themselves in flux. In pregnancy I literally do not have a firm sense of where my body ends and the world begins. My automatic body habits become dislodged; the continuity between my customary body and my body at this moment is broken. In pregnancy, my prepregnant body image does not entirely leave my movements and expectations, yet it is with the pregnant body that I must move. This is another instance of the doubling of the pregnant subject.

I move as if I could squeeze around chairs and through crowds as I could seven months before, only to find my way blocked by my own body sticking out in front of me - but yet not me, since I did not expect it to block my passage. As I lean over in my chair to tie my shore, I am surprised by the graze of this hard belly on my thigh. I do not anticipate my body touching itself, for my habits retain the old sense of my boundaries. In the ambiguity of bodily touch, I feel myself being touched and touching simultaneously, both on my knee and my belly. The belly is other, since I did not expect it there, but since I feel the touch upon it, it is me.”
― Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays

“In classical art this 'aura' surrounding motherhood depicts repose. The dominant culture projects pregnancy as a time of quiet waiting. We refer to the woman as 'expecting,' as though this new life were flying in from another planet and she sat in her rocking chair by the window, occasionally moving the curtain aside to see whether the ship is coming. The image of uneventful waiting associated with pregnancy reveals clearly how much the discourse of pregnancy leaves out the subjectivity of the woman. From the point of view of others pregnancy is primarily a time of waiting and watching, when nothing happens.

For the pregnant subject, on the other hand, pregnancy has a temporality of movement, growth, and change. The pregnant subject is not simply a splitting which the two halves lie open and still, but a dialectic. The pregnant woman experiences herself as a source and participant in a creative process. Though she does not plan and direct it, neither does it merely wash over; rather, she is this process, this change. Time stretches out, moments and days take on a depth because she experiences more changes in herself, her body. Each day, each week, she looks at herself for signs of transformation...

For others the birth of an infant may only be a beginning, but for the birthing woman it is a conclusion as well. It signals the close of a process she has been undergoing for nine months, the leaving of this unique body she has moved through, always surprising her a bit in its boundary changes and inner kicks. Especially if this is her first child she experiences the birth as a transition to a new self that she may both desire and fear. She fears a loss of identity, as though on the other side of the birth she herself became a transformed person, such that she would 'never be the same again.”
― Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays

“Now she felt good. She felt great. She loved her swelling body, loved how everyone gave way before her, paid her tribute, wanted to touch her arm or shoulder. In the mirror, her face glowed. Her days of nausea were forgotten. Pregnancy was easy, it was a breeze on a summer day.”
― John Thorndike, King Robin

“Everyone believes in "Informed Consent" until a woman does not consent.”
― Susan McCutcheon, Natural Childbirth the Bradley Way

“Not only a pregnant woman is an outrage toward ethics but also an attack on aesthetics. Motherhood degrades women, it turns them into cows. With the forgiveness of cows, my sisters.”
― Fernando Vallejo

“In the past week or so, she was noticing some minor pains, small episodes of shortness of breath. Probably because she had a fairly decent-sized lifeform hanging off her spine, pummeling her lungs, playing soccer with her bladder. You know, the usual baby games.”
― Lisa Gardner, 3 Truths and a Lie

“Babies have the tendency to make adults talk like babies.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“One advantage you as a woman can have is no one can surprise you with a kid years later and tell you-you're the mom.”
― Nitya Prakash

“If a womb had a window, the world would sit up and take notice.”
― ALLENE VANOIRSCHOT, Daddy's Little Girl

“The number of people struggling with pregnancy-related stress, pain, and anger at a time that we collectively pretend is the happiest of their lives is staggering.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“After all, what kind of woman isn't filled with boundless joy at the thought of a baby that will, by some people's genuine estimation, rationalize her existence?”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“Imperfections, if we allowed them, can help to create a blinding love to fill a perfectly, imperfect life.”
― ALLENE VANOIRSCHOT, Daddy's Little Girl