Quotes about childbirth

A collection of quotes on the topic of childbirth, death, likeness, women.

Quotes about childbirth

“My greatest hope is that one day our hospital will be devoted to the miracle of childbirth, rather than the tragedy of sexual violence, and that our wards devoted to victims of rape will be empty.”

Denis Mukwege (1955) Congolese gynecologist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Source: Denis Mukwege (2021) cited in " 'We Cannot Rest in Our Fight.' Angelina Jolie Talks to Dr. Denis Mukwege About Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence https://time.com/6124350/angelina-jolie-denis-mukwege/" on TIME, 1 December 2021.

Hope

“He let out a yell of joy. They danced round the room. Pressure of population was such that reproduction had to be strict, controlled. Childbirth required government permission. For this moment, they had waited four years. Incoherently they cried their delight.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)

Waiting, Joy, Dance

“I am not finding pregnancy much of a joy. I am afraid of childbirth, but I am afraid I can't find a way of avoiding it.”

Brigitte Bardot (1934) French model, actor, singer and animal rights activist

Way, Joy

“Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Variant: She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.
Source: This Lullaby

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

Death, Time

“There comes a turning point in intense physical struggle where one abandons oneself to a profligate usage of strength and bodily resource, ignoring the costs until the struggle is over. Women find this point in childbirth; men in battle.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Women, Men

“Men die in battle; women die in childbirth.”

Philippa Gregory book The Red Queen

The Red Queen

Women, Men

“Yeah, well, I’ll be glad to birth it if it means I can name him something normal. (Zarek)
Yeah, yeah. This from a man who whines like a two-year-old when he stubs his toe. I’d like to see you survive ten hours of childbirth. (Astrid)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Warrior

Birth

“If, doubting God's words, you believe this Grant to be false, it will indeed be false. Yet, if you truly believe that you have received this Grant from the Parent and do just as God says, you will be blessed, regardless of whether there is usually good or bad in your mind. The bad will appear elsewhere. In the case of childbirth, you will be blessed with a rapid and easy delivery if you just discard doubt from your mind and follow the teachings of God. But if you harbor doubt and fear, even though there be no wrongdoing in your mind, then the wheel of fear will be set in motion and your fears will be borne out.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

From Yoshikazu Nakayama's biography of Miki, My Oyasama, vol. 2, p. 40–1.
My Oyasama

God, Fear, Parent, Appearance

“After all, animal rightists have not invented the vision of the wolf lying down with the lamb in Isaiah 11:6, or the universal command to be vegetarian in Genesis 1:29, or indeed the vision of the earth in a state of childbirth awaiting its deliverance from suffering in Romans 8: in these, and in other ways, animal rightists can claim to be rediscovering and reactualizing visionary elements already present within the Western religious tradition.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), pp. 54-55

Way, Lying, Suffering, Universe

“An alternate career path for a woman lay in the Church, where as a nun she escaped the dangers of childbirth. In the convent she could hold any position except that of priest, and as an abbess or prioress she had great power and responsibility.”

Marilyn Stokstad (1929–2016) art historian

Overview: Castles in Context
Medieval castles (2005)

“She was worried about childbirth too cause she's little, you know. She's all scared. She's like, "When I have this kid, I want to be knocked out and unconscious." And I'm like "That's how ya were when you got pregnant!" That's full circle, right there! I did feel bad. That's tough. I'm tellin' ya. I felt horrible for her. Just pushing, and sweating, and screaming at the top of her lungs, and pushing and sweating, biting down on a stick… Ugh! Now she knows how I feel after a couple of Hot Pockets. You ever eat them Hot Pockets? Good Lord! I was backed up like a urinal on Saint Patrick's Day after eating them damn things. It was embarrassing. She's in the bed, giving b-[Grunting] I'm on the toilet next to her, [grunting] You know? I'm like "I need another Epidural in here if you got one!"”

Larry the Cable Guy (1963) American stand-up comedian, actor, country music artist, voice artist

Morning Constitutions (2007)

Feeling

“I firmly believe that Mary, according to the words of the gospel as a pure Virgin brought forth for us the Son of God and in childbirth and after childbirth forever remained a pure, intact Virgin.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Zwingli Opera, Corpus Reformatorum, Volume 1, p. 424.

God

“Of the men and women, the women were always the hardest of the band. They knew what the men knew but they also knew what the men would never know. They knew hard work and hunger, but they also knew childbirth and they knew the death of those children. They knew rape and the death of their men. They knew hatred and no one returns hate like a woman.”

Robert Olmstead (1954) American writer

Far Bright Star (2009)

Death, Women, Men, Hunger

“Our world is one of terrible contradictions. Plenty of food but one billion people go hungry. Lavish lifestyles for a few, but poverty for too many others. Huge advances in medicine while mothers die everyday in childbirth... Billions spent on weapons to kill people instead of keeping them safe.”

Ban Ki-moon (1944) 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations

October 2011; Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102012242?q=Ban+Ki-moon&p=par

People, World, Food

“When women and men have approximately equal life expectancies, it seems to be because women die not only in childbirth (fewer than thought) but about equal from… diseases; poor sanitation and water; inadequate healthcare; and diseases of malnutrition. In industrialized societies, early deaths are caused more by diseases triggered by stress, which breaks down the immune system. It is since stress has become the key factor that men have died so much sooner than women.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 182.

Life, Death, Women, Men

“Here, when a woman is in childbirth, it is the husband who takes to his bed. He lies there groaning with his head wrapped up and his wife feeds him with loving care. She even prepares the bath for the event.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book II. Onward to Colchis, Lines 1011–1014

Love

“"No man is an island — " Much as we may feel and act as Individuals, our race is —a single organism, always growing and branching —which must be pruned regularly to be healthy.
This necessity need not be argued; anyone with eyes can see that any organism which grows without limit always dies in its own poisons. The only rational question is whether pruning is best done before or after birth.
Being an incurable sentimentalist I favor the former of these methods —killing makes me queasy, even when it's a case of "He's dead and I'm alive and that's the way I wanted it to be."
But this may be a matter of taste. Some shamans think that it is better to be killed in a war, or to die in childbirth, or to starve in misery, than never to have lived at all. They may be right.
But I don't have to like it —and I don't.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Time Enough for Love (1973)

War, Way, Feeling, Birth

“The puella mother who has never taken up residence in her own body, and therefore fears her own chthonic nature, is not going to experience pregnancy as a quiet meditation with her unborn child, nor birth as a joyful bonding experience. Although she may go through the motions of natural childbirth, the psyche/soma split in her is so deep that physical bonding between her and her baby daughter does not take place. Her child lives with a profound sense of despair, a despair which becomes conscious if in later years she does active imagination with her body and releases waves of grief and terror that resonate with the initial, primal rejection. […] The body that appears in dreams wrapped in fire, encircled by a black snake or encumbered by a fish tail from the waist down, may be holding a death-wish too deep for tears.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: The Pregnant Virgin (1985), p. 37

Death, Fear, Dreams, Imagination

“There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago? When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)

Death, Children, Age, Disease

“The suburban housewife — she was the dream image of the young American women and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife — freed by science and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth, and the illnesses of her grandmother … had found true feminine fulfilment.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 1 "The Problem That Has No Name"

Women, World, Dreams, Science

“[about how people in the 90's used "awesome" wrongly]
Webster's dictionary defines awesome as "anything that leaves you in awe and wonder." Like winning the lottery—twice. That's awesome. Getting a call from the IRS saying you've been audited and they owe you $50,000—that would be awesome. Ladies, you wake up tomorrow morning and the newspaper reads, "Scientists have discovered a way for men to experience childbirth." That would be awesome. Getting invited to the Playboy Mansion—on trampoline night, that would be awesome. And I started thinking, ladies and gentlemen, what would be awesome for Bill Engvall? What would leave me in awe and wonder? And it would have to be, if I left this stage tonight and I went back to my hotel room, and Shania Twain met me at my door, wearing nothing but a fur coat, holding a note from my wife that said, "Have a good time!"”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

THAT would be AWESOME! It ain't gonna happen—but that would be awesome.
Now That's Awesome (2000)

Men, People, Way, Thinking

“Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 1, on the oppressed

Pain

“Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organised beings are.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

New Ideas
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

Pain, Idea

“The twentieth century gave us four-hour bottle feedings of infants, induced labor of childbirth and Caesarian-section deliveries for the convenience of hospitals and doctors, birth and death segregated into isolated, sterile environments empty of human consolation.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

Source: The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eight, Healing Ourselves, p. 269

Birth, Death

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Paul of Tarsus book Epistle to the Romans

Epistle to the Romans

God, Pain, Time, Waiting