Ina May Gaskin Quotes
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When we as a society begin to value mothers as the givers and supporters of life, then we will see social change in ways that matter.
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It's good to laugh at times that feel inappropriate.
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If birth matters, midwives matter. In Europe, there are hospitals where the cesarean rate is less than 10%, and you'll find midwives in these hospitals, you'll see a lot less re-admissions with infections and complications, and you'll see a lot less injury to mothers.
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We midwives and physicians have a lot to teach each other.
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The best a health care system can do is to equip itself to meet the needs of each individual woman and birth. Those needs run the gamut from undisturbed home birth to planned cesarean section.
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We are the only species of mammal that doubts our ability to give birth. It's profitable to scare women about birth. But let's stop it. I tell women: Your body is not a lemon.
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I dreaded having a boring life when I grew up. And I certainly can't complain about being bored.
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It's very rare to see an undisturbed birth in a modern U.S. teaching hospital, but when you see a woman who isn't frightened, who's giving birth without interference, you stand back in awe and realize how little needed you are except in the rare circumstance.
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I had to learn not to let anyone push me around, to be brave and to say things I knew might make people mad.
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I know of no country in the world that has passed a law specifically denying a woman's right to choose where she intends to give birth.
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Why should nutrition matter less in the creation of young humans than it does in young plants? I'm sure that it doesn't.
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I have never observed even the slightest laceration in a woman who used clitoral stimulation as a relaxation method during birth. Clitoral stimulation seems to increase vaginal engorgement as the baby emerges.
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There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it.
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I think midwifery was developed by people with common sense, people who were close to nature, and people who observed other species of mammals and saw that there were lessons there to be learned.
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The Creator is not a careless mechanic.
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It will take your breastfed baby an average of five to six months to double her birth weight.
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If a woman doesn't look like a Goddess during labor, then someone isn't treating her right.
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Don't criticize nature, stand in awe of it.
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Breast stimulation is especially effective in starting labor at term when it is combined with sexual intercourse. Unless your partner is an abysmally poor lover, this combination is by far the most enjoyable method of induction.
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Nothing in medical literature today communicates the idea that women's bodies are well-designed for birth. Ignorance of the capacities of women's bodies can flourish and quickly spread into the popular culture when the medical profession is unable to distinguish between ancient wisdom and superstitious belief.
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When you destroy midwives, you also destroy a body of knowledge that is shared by women, that can’t be put together by a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of male obstetricians, because physiologically, birth doesn’t happen the same way around surgeons, medically trained doctors, as it does around sympathetic women.
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Simply put, when there is no home birth in a society, or when home birth is driven completely underground, essential knowledge of women’s capacities in birth is lost to the people of that society—to professional caregivers, as well as to the women of childbearing age themselves.
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I think that women can be just completely surprised by the change in them from giving birth-you have something powerful in you-that fierce thing comes up-and I think babies need moms to have that fierceness-you feel like you can do anything and that’s the feeling we want moms to have.
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Remember this, for it is as true as true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth as well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.