“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