These Midwife quotes will inspire you. A midwife is a trained health professional who helps healthy women during labor, delivery, and after the birth of their babies.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging Midwife quotes, Midwife sayings, and Midwife proverbs.
Best Midwife Quotes
- “It’s not just the making of babies, but the making of mothers that midwives see as the miracle of birth.” ~ Barbara Katz Rothman
- “The greatest privilege of a human life is to become a midwife to the awakening of the Soul in another person.” ~ Plato
- “In all cultures, the midwife’s place is on the threshold of life, where intense human emotions, fear, hope, longing, triumph, and incredible physical power enable a new human being to emerge. Her vocation is unique.” ~ Sheila Kitzinger
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“Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers.” ~ Barbara Katz Rothman
- “Speak tenderly; let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of your greeting. Always have a cheerful smile. Don’t only give your care, but give your heart as well.” ~ Mother Teresa
- “Every midwife knows
that not until a mother’s womb
softens from the pain of labor
will a way unfold
and the infant find that opening to be born.
Oh, friend!
There is treasure in your heart,
it is heavy with child.
Listen.
All the awakened ones,
like trusted midwives are saying,
‘welcome this pain.
It opens the dark passage of Grace.” ~ Rumi - “Birth is about making mothers… strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength” ~ Barbara Katz Rothman
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“I am just one of many many thousands of midwives, who are devoted to saving lives gently.” ~ Robin Lim
- “If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery. To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women. And imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them.” ~ Michel Odent , Midwife quotes about childbirth
- “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.” ~ Ina May Gaskin
- “As a midwife, I am immersed in Oxytocin day and night.” ~ Robin Lim
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“A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.” ~ Billy Wilder
- “Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.” ~ Jennifer Worth
- “Birthing is the most profound initiation to spirituality a woman can have.” ~ Robin Lim
- “Midwives and doctors play a crucial role preventing unnecessary maternal deaths. They educate women about nutrition, health, and family planning. And they step in when complications arise.” ~ Liya Kebede
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“Pain is God’s midwife, that helps some virtue into existence.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher
- “We should work to guarantee that there is a midwife or health worker by every woman’s side during childbirth.” ~ Liya Kebede
- “After disasters, reproductive healthcare falls by the wayside. Yet babies continue to be born. When all infrastructure falls apart, when the hospitals and all their technological equipment are destroyed, midwives come in handy. They can help women give birth with or without electricity, running water, equipment – even shelter is optional. When babies are ready, they come.” ~ Robin Lim
- “Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.” ~ David Ogilvy
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“We are meant to midwife dreams for one another. Success occurs in clusters” ~ Julia Cameron
- “One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action – the ability to pass directly from thought to action.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “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.” ~ Ina May Gaskin , Midwife quotes about birth
- “For far too many, pregnancy and birth is still something that happens to them rather than something they set out consciously and joyfully to do themselves” ~ Sheila Kitzinger
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“The writer is the midwife of understanding.” ~ Arundhati Roy
- “When you are in hard labor, remember that the length of labor is usually proportional to the number of people around. Avoid the presence of anybody who might release adrenaline. The best situation I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody else around than an experienced, motherly and silent midwife who does not behave like a guide or an observer.” ~ Michel Odent
- “Women’s bodies have their own wisdom, and a system of birth refined over 100,000 generations is not so easily overpowered.” ~ Sarah J. Buckley
- “Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.” ~ Dan Simmons
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“Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” ~ Karl Marx
- “I still deliver like a midwife” ~ Drake
- “Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.” ~ Grace Lee Boggs
- “Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.” ~ Sylvia Plath , Midwife quotes love
- “There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife – a tyrannical midwife.” ~ Stephen Spender
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“The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word.” ~ Mesa Selimovic
- “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.” ~ Ina May Gaskin
- “Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to ‘give birth’ to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.” ~ Jostein Gaarder
- “No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.” ~ Adrienne Rich
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“I was not the midwife of the Law School, but its fraternal twin.” ~ Norman Lamm
- “The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife’s hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife’s expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before.” ~ Leo Tolstoy
- “Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.” ~ Ina May Gaskin
- “Paddy was in the delivery room when the midwife handed him a black baby. “Is this yours?” she asked “probably” said Paddy “she burns everything else”” ~ Billy Connolly
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“Prayer is the midwife of mercy, that helps to bring it forth.” ~ Matthew Henry
- “It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians simply on the grounds that obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor.” ~ Ina May Gaskin
- “No times were more dangerous than when our country was born when revolution was our midwife.” ~ Daniel Inouye
- “The Creator is not a careless mechanic.” ~ Ina May Gaskin
- “Women are being told to get midwives [in UK] because there’s not enough room and there’s not enough pain medicine at the hospitals.” ~ Rush Limbaugh
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“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” ~ John Dewey
- “No other natural bodily function is painful and childbirth should not be an exception” ~ Grantly Dick-Read
- “The one seeks a midwife to deliver his thoughts, the other, someone to assist: thus a good conversation comes into being.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.” ~ Alain de Botton
- “Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.” ~ Clifton Fadiman
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“The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.” ~ George Saunders
- “Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.” ~ John Taylor Gatto
- “I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can’t understand anything I write. And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And among my friends, I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I’m fascinated by this mastery of the practical.” ~ Sylvia Plath
- “At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools…. [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.” ~ H. L. Mencken
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“In a nutshell, I am a mom, a grandma, and a midwife.” ~ Robin Lim
- “A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.” ~ Jean Renoir
- “Country music has been empowering to women. Women invented it – it was women singing to their children that built country music. The people making country music today might not even know that it all started with a midwife. But it’s true, it really did. That’s where Michael learned to shake it the way he did. It wasn’t from old Papa Jackson, I’ll tell you that.” ~ Ketch Secor
- “How do you teach someone that a theatre comes about first as an idea, from an individual who has a philosophy and a passion? That a theatre’s idea is its heart and individual soul? That the person who creates it must have the desire not only to create work but also to create the conditions in which that work can live-and in which others can do it as well? How do you teach someone to want to be a midwife as well as a mother.” ~ Robert Kalfin
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“Adversity is the midwife of genius” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “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, rhinoceros, 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.” ~ Ina May Gaskin
- “How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife?” ~ Sue Monk Kidd
- “It is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of Europe, its midwives, and healers, then crossed the oceans to Africa and the Americas and tortured and enslaved, raped, impoverished, and eradicated the peaceful, Christ-like people they found. And that the blueprint from which they worked, and still work, was the Bible.” ~ Alice Walker
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“I had amazing midwives when I first became a teen-aged mom, and each of the five times I gave birth.” ~ Robin Lim
- “There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy, but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world’s policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world’s midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.” ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick
