Quotes About Midwifery

Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.

What I've learnt is that being a midwife is not a job about cute babies. And as a maternity care assistant there's a lot of cleaning involved. It's a vocation.

Well, my art of midwifery is in most respects like theirs; but differs, in that I attend men and not women, and I look after their souls when they are in labor, and not after their bodies: and the triumph of my art is in thoroughly examining whether the thought which the mind of the young man brings forth is a false idol or a noble and true birth.

In a nutshell, I am a mom, a grandma, and a midwife.

Abortion politics have distracted all sides from what is really essential: a major aid campaign to improve midwifery, prenatal care and emergency obstetric services in poor countries.

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

Berta Caceres, a Lenca woman, grew up during the violence that swept through Central America in the 1980s. Her mother, a midwife and social activist, took in and cared for refugees from El Salvador, teaching her young children the value of standing up for disenfranchised people.

Actions and local occurrences said to indicate witchcraft included nonpayment of rent, demand for public assistance, giving the "evil-eye," local die-offs of horses or other stock, and mysterious deaths of children. Also among the telltale actions were practices related to midwifery and any kind of contraception.

I've even delivered a few of their babies. (Wulf) Really? (Cassandra) Oh, yeah. You have to love the days before modern roads, and hospitals when I was up to my elbows in placenta. (Wulf)

I love to receive babies into this world, so crawling around on my knees in the birth room is my best place, and most often you can still find me there.

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

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.

When I ask my medical students to describe their image of a woman who elects to birth with a midwife rather than with an obstetrician, they generally describe a woman who wears long cotton skirts, braids her hair, eats only organic vegan food, does yoga, and maybe drives a VW microbus.

I've even delivered a few of their babies. (Wulf) Really? (Cassandra) Oh, yeah. You have to love the days before modern roads, and hospitals when I was up to my elbows in placenta. (Wulf)

Midwives not only save lives. They are also actors of social change.

I was always interested in becoming a midwife. Then, at my own birth, I didn't get the support I'd hoped for, and that changed everything. That's why I became a doula. There's such a need.

I truly believe being a midwife is the greatest job for a feminist. It's women helping women, believing in them at a time when they're thinking, 'Am I ever going to get through this?'

I always thought my alternative life, if I wasn't acting, would be to become a midwife. I love women. I want to help them exist.

My dad's an English teacher and my mum's a midwife. Then my mum's side of the family are all crazy creative.

Many midwives work as employees in large hospital practices, where the techno-medical model of care is still the rule. In practices like these, midwives are used to attract women who desire midwifery care, but they may in fact be under constant pressure to practice within the techno-medical mode.

Midwives provide all the prenatal care healthy women need. The midwifery ideal is to work with each woman and her family to identify her unique physical, social, and emotional needs. In general, midwifery care is associated with fewer episiotomies, fewer instrumental deliveries, fewer epidurals, and fewer cesarean sections. Midwives are trained to identify the relatively small percentage of births in which complications develop and to refer these to obstetricians.

But like the formation of the American Medical Association with its explicit goal of discrediting midwives; and the institutionalization of the natural sciences, which labeled many women 'amateur naturalists,' while men grabbed government and university jobs as botanists, entomologists, and astronomers; the change erected financial and cultural barriers for all women and racial barriers for those who weren't white.

I am persuaded from long years of experience amongst women of many nationalities that good midwifery is essential for the true happiness of motherhood – that good midwifery is the birth of a baby in a manner nearest to the natural law and design – and good midwifery, next to wise and healthy pregnancy, sets the pattern of the newborn infant and its relationship to its mother.

We should work to guarantee that there is a midwife or health worker by every woman's side during childbirth.