"You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore." -C. Cheng
"Once your mind is stretched by a new idea, it will never again return to its original size." -Oliver Wendall Holmes
"In the depths of winter I finally learned there was
in me an invincible summer." -Albert Camus
"I had the overwhelming feeling that what we needed to do was nothing." -Elizabeth von der Ahe, midwife
"Be bold. Be proud. Persist in spreading the word that midwives are not only experts in normal birth, but also expert at keeping birth normal." -Judy Edmunds, CPM
"My real work as a midwife has been to get out of the way and let women do their work." -June Whitson, CNM
"Hospital birth turns what should be like an ordinary car journey into a situation resembling a driving test." -Margaret Jowitt
"Somewhere between the beginning of the third year of medical school and the completion of residency, many of us seem to lose our ability to discriminate fact from belief as we are exposed more and more to practical techniques that "seem" to work and less and less to scientific theory and proof that our theories and practices are scientifically valid." -Don Creevy, M.D.
"Doctors in all countries except perhaps Holland need to hear over and over again that a woman has the right to choose where and with whom she wants to birth. A woman's autonomy must be respected." -Henny Ligtermoet
"Mothers' arms are, by far, the safest baby warmer that has ever been invented." - Doris Haire
"American obstetrics has become so preoccupied with apparatus and with possible fetal injury that the mothers are increasingly being considered solely as vehicles. In many instances, small and uncertain gain for the infant is purchased at the price of a small but grave risk to the mother." - Anon. M.D. quoted by Helen Marieskind
"Childbirth is a moment of transformation during which feminine wisdom takes over to connect the birthing woman to all others." - Mary Rucklos Hampton
"The midwife is often the instrument for change within a family because the family members are empowered by the prenatal and birth experiences, and they begin to believe in their own bodies and intuitions." - Sharon Wells
"To respect the instinctual nature of birth, we must allow the process to unfold for each unique individual. As midwives it is our job to facilitate, not control, this process." -Joanne Dozor
"The human breast itself is capable of something the formula industry will never be able to duplicate: adjusting the contents of milk to suit a baby's daily, even hourly needs." -Rita Laws
"In my dream, all parties choose to reject the kind of rigid and hierarchical thinking that assumes there can be only one standard, so that if there are two, that has to mean that one is better and the other is worse. There is more than one good way to do something good!" [on setting standards for midwifery] -Robbie Davis-Floyd
"We are only now discovering the long-term
destructive effect on human beings and families of treating women as if
they were merely containers, to be opened and relieved of their contents;
and of concentrating attention on a bag of muscle and a birth canal, rather
than relating to, and caring for, the person to whom they belong." -Sheila Kitzinger
"What separates most birthing women today from women in the past is the loss of familiarity with the birth process, the loss of community with other women, and the loss of traditional feminine wisdom." -Suzanne Arms
"Recall may be affected by the vividness of information: Is it not easier to remember the story about the emergency transfer for cord prolapse than of the woman who labored for two hours and gave birth gently at home?" - Sara Wickham
"Obstetrics should be both art and science. The science lies in what we know to be true, the art lies in how that information is used for greatest benefit to mothers and babies." - Don Creevy, OB
"Birth is an adventure--let's make it a good one." - Lisa Hines, licensed midwife
"Birth is not logical." - Gloria Lemay
"Birth is all about opening. It opens a mother's body, but it also opens her heart and her mind." - Laurie Fremgen
"Only by giving each baby a gentle, natural birth will we have children who act out of inner peace and interact with others in a balanced, harmonious way. As these children grow up and those of us with wounded patterns heal, we will have jointly created a new society." - Sunni Karll
"Deep in the heart and soul of most women there is a yearning to experience birth as a natural expression of infinite love and creativity." - Benig Mauger
"Would we make different choices in our lives if we acknowledged that our infants are completely aware?" - Elly Leduc
"Medical birthing knowledge is based on absurd observations of women attempting to give birth in cages." - Leilah McCracken
"I am grateful to be connected to my inner sense of the 'rightness' of natural homebirth, but I find it totally bizarre that I have to become a modern-day Joan of Arc to accomplish that goal." - Piper Allan Severns
"So many servants of birth insinuate rules and regulations, the 'standards of care,' between the birthing woman and the power of birth. In this fashion, they destroy her faith in herself." - Ellen C. Waff
"It is our destiny to flower full and female in birth and in love; it is our calling to be powerful and free as women." - Leilah McCracken
"We must give women the opportunity to challenge their fears, to work with them and birth through them. Not only will this change each woman, it will change the political and medical climate in which they make these choices." - Connee L. Pike-Urlacher
"Life is not always fair, nor is it totally in our control. Forces in life--call them God, nature, or fate--are bigger than we are and sometimes have an agenda different from our own." - Nina Chaya Sabghir
"A sort of chemical 'combination lock' starts labor. Everything has to be lined up just right to 'unlock' a good labor pattern. When we interfere with that, it can be as frustrating as using the wrong combination of numbers to open a locked safe." - Gail Hart
"Where would all the specialists and producers of medical technology and drugs be if it were suddenly 'discovered' that when women eat well in pregnancy, eliminate drugs and stop substance abuse, almost all complications disappear?" - Anne Frye
"Epidurals rip women off of an opportunity to experience themselves as competent adults." - Margaret Egeland, CNM
"The effort to separate the physical experience of childbirth from the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of this event has served to disempower and violate women." - Mary Rucklos Hampton
"Birth is an experience that demonstrates that life is not merely function and utility, but form and beauty." - Christopher Largen
"Natural childbirth has evolved to suit the species, and if mankind chooses to ignore her advice and interfere with her workings we must not complain about the consequences. We have only ourselves to blame." - Margaret Jowitt
"Just as a woman's heart knows how and when to pump, her lungs to inhale, and her hand to pull back from fire, so she knows when and how to give birth." - Virginia Di Orio
"Women today not only possess genetic memory of birth from a
thousand generations of women, but they are also assailed from every
direction by information and misinformation about birth." -Valerie El Halta
"Perhaps too many of us see pain as a badge of courage -- proof that we are just as strong as men." - Laura Kaplan Shanley
"Technology has turned the fetus into a patient, reducing the mother to being the 'maternal environment' and preventing attachment until after the ultrasound has shown the fetus to be 'normal.'" - Jennifer Hall
"I threw away the things I was trained to do. I had to go back to
basics, go back to nature and let this body, this woman, this
pregnancy, grow on its own steam. Remember, if you're getting your
training among wolves, you're going to act like a wolf." -Tom Brewer, MD
"Birthing is the most profound initiation to spirituality a woman can have." - Robin Lim
"I'm an advocate of truly having your eyes opened and honestly appraising how much power you really have, not pretending that you will have as much power as you desire, just because you really want it. I think that's the essence of informed consent." - Gretchen Humphries
"The best way to avoid a cesarean is to stay out of the hospital." - Brooke Sanders Purves
"Women's strongest feelings [in terms of their birthings], positive
and negative, focus on the way they were treated by their caregivers." -Annie Kennedy & Penny Simkin
"When a woman births at home, it is a demonstration of civil and medical disobedience that defies the medicalization of her body's normal function while it honors her inherent, amazing power." — Chantal Molnar
"We must attempt to tell the whole truth about birth, the truth that includes transformation, mastery, satisfaction, personal power, and the difference between pain and suffering." — Cheri Van Hoover
"It's kinda fun doing the impossible." — Walt Disney
"Every culture develops rituals around major transformational life events that reinforce the core beliefs of the culture. Our culture's core beliefs relevant to birth are that technology is superior to nature and that women are inferior and untrustworthy." — Henci Goer
"The unborn baby is truly a sentient and intelligent human being who has much to go through at birth. We owe it to future generations to change birth experiences to make birth an easier transition and a gateway to a fuller life." — Nick Owen
"When women's lives are busy, their money and work paramount, they come into birth with the same expectations as their trips to a convenience store: they want to get in and get out with what they came for. But natural birth requires preparation, emotional and physical." — Connee Pike-Urlacher
"Birth is a fundamentally successful natural process that turns out well with very little intervention most of the time." — Robbie Davis-Floyd
"H. Deutsch, a psychologist active in the 1940s, knew that at the time of birth, it is not just a vagina that is opening, the woman's entire psyche is open and vulnerable." — Nancy Wainer and Lois J. Estner
"Even after more than 250 births, I still can't get enough of that moment." — Jerry Whiting, partero
"I eliminated obstetrics/gynecology as a specialty because although delivering babies was a happy event, the emphasis was on the challenges of surgery." — Denise Punger, MD, IBCLC
"It may be worth considering that ultimate satisfaction with the experience of giving birth may not be related to lack of pain." — Sarah Buckley
"Given the opportunity to voice their opinions about what is happening in their labor and how their baby is doing, women will often give you a very accurate account. The key is to listen to them." — Jill Cohen
"Everything is about language, and when we master speaking the importance of natural childbirth, we will easily enlist the whole of North America in the project of returning birth to women." — Gloria Lemay
"Having seen everything that can go wrong at least a few times doesn't shake my confidence in the essential beauty and miracle of birth." — Maggie Ramsey
"Every pregnancy, labor, and birthing experience is unlike any other. Why expect the same birth model from every woman?" — Samantha Clemens
“One of the most important questions midwives can ask [a pregnant woman] is ‘How do you see yourself giving birth?’” — Andrea Mietkiewicz
"In trying to beat death, we have devised a monstrous system that hurts most women and babies and results in societal breakdown." — Gloria Lemay
"When we birth consciously, putting our great rational mind on hold and allowing our instinctive nature to dominate, we can access the wisdom that all spiritual traditions teach: the ego is our servant, not our mistress; and our path to ecstasy and enlightenment involves surrendering our egotistical notions of control." — Sarah Buckley
“The thing that helps more than anything [at a birth] is that the person who's helping you loves you. It can make the difference between heavy complications and having a nice time.” — Ina May Gaskin, 1979
"If you want to know what has gone wrong in obstetrics, read the pediatric journals." — Doris Haire, 1977
"According to the medical model, life is a problem because it is full of risk and in almost constant danger, an assumption easily accepted if one's professional career is spent surrounded by pathology, suffering, and death." - Marsden Wagner, MD
"The holistic model of birth holds that birth is a normal, woman-centered process in which mind and body are one and that, in the vast majority of cases, nature is sufficient to create healthy pregnancy and birth." - Penfield Chester
"Whenever care decisions are based less on the needs of an individual mother and more on the needs of the practitioner, the mother loses." - Jennifer Rosenberg
"Prevention is a worthy and good cause. The problem is that her cousin, intervention, likes to follow only a few paces behind." - Mayri Sagady
"The knowledge of how to give birth without outside intervention lies deep within each woman. Successful childbirth depends on an acceptance of the process." - Suzanne Arms
"One is constantly having to balance the high expectations of modern health care with the need to respect the human soul. This is especially so with birth." - Benig Mauger, from Reclaiming
the Spirituality of Birth
Jedan od odgovora onima koji govore da majke misle samo na sebe:
"Research has shone bright lights on what women have always known: Dynamic systems are sensitive to start-up conditions. Thus, a gentle birth is life enhancing for the human organism." - Robin Lim
"In today's world of ultrasound on demand, amniocentesis, and even attempted cloning, the unproven assumption is that the more parents know about their unborn babies, the better." - Elizabeth Bruce
"The parallels between making love and giving birth are clear, not only in terms of passion and love, but also because we need essentially the same conditions for both experiences: privacy and safety." - Sarah Buckley
Jedan od odgovora na pitanje kako to da ipak radjamo u uvjetima koji su protiv radjanja:
"Women's bodies have their own wisdom, and a system of birth refined over 100,000 generations is not so easily overpowered." - Sarah Buckley
"Just one birth that is treated as sacred can influence the life experience of one being." — Robyn Sheldon
"Every [hospital] intervention is a lesson in who really owns your body and your baby's body." — Jock Doubleday
"One of the most natural remedies I know of is grown and cultivated in the human spirit. It is the healing art of listening." — Alison Parra Bastien
"A real leader will never ask people to accept their opinion as the last word." — Debbie A. Diaz-Ortiz
"Unfortunately we live in a society that is addicted to drama, and the mainstream media continue to help satisfy the addiction with their sensational stories about birth." — Linda McHale and Barbara Nobel Schelling
Citat koristan za argumentaciju prisustva bliske osobe:
"Childbirth being one's most significant life passage, those close to us when we open to birth a baby will never be forgotten." — Robin Lim
"By strengthening women we strengthen our children and therefore our communities." — Julie Brill
"We must work to make the pursuit of birth happiness a feasible option for as many women as possible, in as many ways as possible." — Jennifer Rosenberg
"No one ever taught us how to make love, and no one needs to teach us how to give birth." — Joanne Dozer
"The first intervention in natural childbirth is the one that a healthy woman does herself when she walks out the front door of her own home in labour." — Michael Rosenthal, OB/GYN
:D
"The way to prevent episiotomies is not to do them." — Katherine Jensen
"Birth became something that was performed on women rather than something that women performed." — Colleen Bak
"It is my dream that all children will be born gently, in the peace and safety of home, without fear." — Telka Mahanaga
"Privacy is as essential to birth as it is to sex." — Laura Shanley
Nešto za doule i primalje:
"Keep your hands off and keep your hands out; keep the lights dim and the talking down. Expect normalcy." — Vicki Penwell
"Nothing will change as long as women say nothing." — Cynthia Blynn
Kratko i jasno:
"When human beings release adrenaline, they cannot release oxytocin." — Michel Odent
"Women want a sacred space for birthing that is their own, where they can feel the mystery of birth and at the same time try to master the process in the way that they choose." — Michele Klein
Nešto za razmišljanje (iliti što ti je propaganda):
"I am amazed to have been a midwife from the era in which women marched in the streets, demanding normal births without medication, to a time when they expect an epidural as soon as it is allowed in labor, even planning elective cesareans and giving up the gift of birthing their children altogether." — Katherine Jensen
"The midwife considers the miracle of childbirth as normal, and leaves it alone unless there's trouble. The obstetrician normally sees childbirth as trouble: if he leaves it alone, it's a miracle." — Sheila Stubbs
"Normal birth should become standard, saving technology for urgent, emergency situations." — Jill Cohen
"A wise midwife does not pick unripe fruit." — Gloria Lemay
"Let us support one another, not just in philosophy but in action, for the sake of freedom for all women to choose exactly how and by whom, if by anyone, our bodies will be handled." — Linda Hessel
"By paying attention to the language and art of touch, it is possible to shape a positive birth experience." — Michele Klein
"They don't understand fisiology of birth." — Michel Odent
“Although we now have sufficient scientific data to be able to say that routine prenatal ultrasound scanning has no effectiveness and may very well carry risks, it would be naive to think that routine use will not continue.”
— Marsden Wagner, MD
“Treating normal labors as though they were complicated can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
— Judith Rooks
"You are a midwife. You are assisting at someone else's birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must, take the lead. Lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the babe is born the mother will rightly say, 'We did it ourselves.'"
— Lao Tzu, in Tao Te Ching
"If doula were a drug, it would be unethical not to use it."
— Dr, John H. Kennell
"Attending births is like growing roses. You have to marvel at the ones that just open up and bloom at the first kiss of the sun but you wouldn't dream of pulling open the petals of the tightly closed buds and forcing them to blossom on your time line."
— Gloria Lemay
$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding."
— Frank Oski, MD
"The traditional midwife believes that birth proceeds in a spiral fashion: labor starts, stops and starts, while the baby goes down, up and down, and the cervix opens, closes and opens. Nature has no design for failure; she holds her own meaning for success."
— Sher Willis
"We have a secret in our culture, and it's not that birth is painful; it's that women are strong."
— Laura Stavoe Harm
"My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass."
— Leslie Grimutter
"Natural childbirth allows the hormones that have been working for women for thousands of years to fulfill their functions. This is more important than just helping a woman through labor and delivery. Birth-related hormones also affect well-being much later in life."
— Janet Schwegel, Adventures in Natural Childbirth
"If one feels the need of something grand, something infinite, something that makes one feel aware of God, one need not go far to find it. I think that I see something deeper, more infinite, more eternal than the ocean in the expression of the eyes of a little baby when it wakes in the morning and coos or laughs because it sees the sun shining on its cradle."
— Vincent Van Gogh
"If the general public continues to be indoctrinated into medicalized birth, how can we expect women to stand up and fight against the marginalization of freestanding birth centers and midwifery in this country?"
— Colleen Bak
"Birth is not only about making babies. It's about making mothers—strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and believe in their inner strength."
— Barbara Katz Rothman
"The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words."
— Rachel Naomi Remen
"…a woman can give birth intact, uninjured, and unafraid."
— Ina May Gaskin
"Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother."
— Kahlil Gibran
"Ultimately, risk, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder."
— Dr. M.F. Green
"What makes pain intolerable to women is fear. What takes the fear away is knowledge, relaxation and focus. Yes, when these things are incorporated, there will still be pain but it will not be intolerable. Remember, you are hearing this from a certified wimp."
— Gloria Lemay
"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."
— William James
"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."
— Saint Augustine
"Breast milk is better than any udder milk!"
— Unknown
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do."
— Edward Everett Hale
"Only about 15% of medical interventions are supported by solid scientific evidence…. This is partly because only 1% of the studies in medical journals are scientifically sound and partly because many treatments have not been assessed at all."
— Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal
"Unfortunately, the role of obstetrics has never been to help women give birth. There is a big difference between the medical discipline we call "obstetrics" and something completely different, the art of midwifery. If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery. To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women. And imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them."
— Michel Odent, MD
"Formula feeding is the longest lasting uncontrolled experiment lacking informed consent in the history of medicine."
— Frank Oski, MD
retired editor, Journal of Pediatrics
"I take the dolphin approach. Dolphins have a midwife in attendance at their births, breastfeed for about two years, birth all their babies in water and have been doing this longer than humans. After a dolphin birth, either the mother or the midwife, in a fluid movement, brings the baby up to the surface for the first breath."
— Marina Alzugaray
"Lysol-loyal hospital staff are worried about the germs your children carry with them, but it is the germs carried by staff and ever present in the infectious hospital that are truly to be feared."
— Jock Doubleday
"Integrity commits itself to character over personal gain, to people over things, to service over power, to principle over convenience, to the long view over the immediate."
— John C. Maxwell
The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.
— Margaret Mead
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