Ina May Gaskin, CPM, (born March 8th, 1940)
A society that places a low value on its mothers and the process of birth will suffer an array of negative repercussions for doing so. Good beginnings make a positive difference in the world, so it is worth our while to provide the best possible care for mothers and babies throughout this extraordinarily influential part of life.
Why should nutrition matter less in the creation of young humans than it does in young plants? I'm sure that it doesn't.
Squat 300 times a day, you’re going to give birth quickly.
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.
If a woman doesn't look like a Goddess during labor, then someone isn't treating her right.
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.
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.
Why should insurance companies continue to get away with limiting the skills that a health profession has always previously required of its members if they were to be considered fully trained?
Many of our problems in US maternity care stem from the fact that we leave no room for recognizing when nature is smarter than we are.
Why do we, then, continue to treat women as if their emotions and comfort, and the postures they might want to assume while in labor, are against the rules?
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.
The human species is no more unsuited to give birth than any other of the 5,000 or so species of mammals on the planet. We are merely the most confused.
Don't criticize nature, stand in awe of it.
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.
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.
Pregnant and birthing mothers are elemental forces, in the same sense that gravity, thunderstorms, earthquakes, and hurricanes are elemental forces. In order to understand the laws of their energy flow, you have to love and respect them for their magnificence at the same time that you study them with the accuracy of a true scientist.
Why in the world do the insurance companies get to be the boss of birth? That's what I want to know.
Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.
I had to learn not to let anyone push me around, to be brave and to say things I knew might make people mad.
When you cast doubt on some bodily function- you don't know how sensitive the body is to that kind of idea.