My understanding of voodoo is that it was important to the people who practiced it because it helped them survive. There are practical ways it enabled survival. It used herbal medicine to heal, to aid in childbirth. It was a spiritual system. It made room for hope and for magic and for possibility. For people who struggle and fight to survive and who fight to live, those are really important things.
I became a passionate seeker of childbirth knowledge.
It is not only that we want to bring about an easy labor, without risking injury to the mother or the child; we must go further. We must understand that childbirth is fundamentally a spiritual, as well as a physical, achievement. . . The birth of a child is the ultimate perfection of human love.
Poverty is a lot like childbirth - you know it is going to hurt before it happens, but you'll never know how much until you experience it.
The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.
It keeps startling me that at the beginning of this 21st century, at a time when we can. . . explore the depths of the seas and build an international space station, we have not been able to make childbirth safe for all women around the world. . . . This is one of the greatest social causes of our time.
A mother never fully delivers.
There are times when the adoption process is exhausting and painful and makes you want to scream. But, I am told, so does childbirth.
O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after childbirth! O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!
It is unheard-of, uncivilized barbarism that any woman should still be forced to bear such monstrous torture. It should be remedied. It should be stopped. It is simply absurd that, with our modern science, painless childbirth does not exist as a matter of course. . . . I tremble with indignation when I think ofthe unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied.
You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you're able to forget how bad it was the last time.
Certainly in terms of my life - anybody's life - you go through death, childbirth and marriage, glory and defeat, and so on.
Having a baby is definitely a labor of love.
Childbirth calls into question our very existence, requiring an expectant couple to confront not only new life but death, pain, fear and, most of all, change.
I think there can always be beauty in struggle. I mean, as far as childbirth, I had my son in the hospital, but then I had my daughter at home. There's no doubt that there's a struggling in birth, and a beauty and a horror and fear and joy too.
The pain of childbirth is not remembered. It's the child that's remembered.
I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
Men should spend less time with guns and more time in childbirth.
Give it up for the process that leads to childbirth!
She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.
