Quotes for Midwives

My last meeting with the lovely midwifery students I've been working with in Papua New Guinea is this morning.

 Pacific Adventist University Midwifery Students PNG

I've been surfing the net, looking for quotes that relate to midwifery, women and birth that I thought would inspire them.   I've come across the following and thought I'd share them with you.

"You are a midwife, assisting at someone else’s birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: “We did it ourselves!”  - From The Tao Te Ching

Speak tenderly to them. Let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of our greeting. Always have a cheerful smile. Don’t only give your care, but give your heart as well. ~ Mother Teresa

Ask me for strength and I will lend not only my hand, but also my heart. ~ Unknown

If you lay down, the baby will never come out! ~ Native American saying

Offer hugs, not drugs ~ Adina Lebowitz

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man (sic) will have discovered fire. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Just as a woman's heart knows how and when to pump, her lungs to inhale, and her hand to pull back from fire, so she knows when and how to give birth. ~Virginia Di Orio

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

For God hath not give us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. ~2Timothy 1:7

If I had my life to live over, instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy, I'd have cherished ever moment and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was the only chance in life to assist God in a miracle. ~Irma Bombeck

Making the decision to have a baby – it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone

What's done to children, they will do to society. ~Karl Menninger

A woman
in harmony
with her spirit
is like
a river flowing.
She goes
where she will
without pretense
and arrives
at her destination,
prepared
to be herself
and only herself.
~Maya Angelou

Right Livelihood Award: Ina May Gaskin

The world's premier award for personal courage and social transformation, The Right Livelihood Award honours and supports those "offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today".

The wonderful Ina May Gaskin, affectionately referred to as 'the mother of midwifery', was awarded the Right Livelihood Award this year for:

“… for her whole-life’s work teaching and advocating safe, woman-centred childbirth methods that best promote the physical and mental health of mother and child.“

Ina May's acceptance speech is sobering as she carefully catalogues the abuses that have been and continue to be perpetrated against women and their babies in the name of industrialised birth; inspirational as she talks about the brave and loving doctors who have acted in the face of repression and vilification from their less than women centred peers and seek to scare women into submission to the medical juggernaut...

"We must wake up to the fact that it is easy to scare women about their bodies, especially in countries in which midwives have little or no power in policy-making, relative to physicians and the influence of large corporate entities. This takes no real talent. Given such imbalance, fear, ignorance, and greed begin to reinforce each other, and rates of unnecessary intervention soar, with women and the babies suffering the consequences"

Ina May's speech is heart warming as she asks the Hungarian Goverment to release Agnes Gereb, a Hungarian doctor who supported women to birth at home and encouraging as she offers a vision of a better world through optimising midwifery care and supporting women's choices ...

Another site came across my computer screen this morning, and given the content is highly relevant to the content of Ina May's speech, I thought it was entirely appropriate to link it here.

I'm not sure why the midwife broke the sac on this breech baby as she was born, I would have thought it was better left alone to provide that lovely buffer that intact membranes offer.  Even so, I'm grateful to the woman and her family and to the midwives for sharing this delightful photo journey. The explanatory notes are very useful.

Ina May's book Spiritual Midwifery, together with Frederick Leboyer's Birth Without Violence, changed my world when they were released in 1976.  I first heard Ina May speak at a preconfernce workshop at the 1992 Homebirth Conference in Sydney.   I was so emotional on being in the presence of Ina May, that I spent most of the workshop in tears - her passion and 'right thinking' about women and birth still has that effect on me as I watch and listen to her speech accepting her Right Livelihood award.  Thank you Ina May for all you have done and are doing for Women and Birth and Midwifery.  Congratulations on receiving this prestigious award. You certainly deserve it.

What birth activists can learn from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, the person, will be sadly and achingly missed by his family and friends and Steve Jobs the genius, will be missed by those of us who enjoy the amazing fruits of his formidable creativity and attention to detail.

So why, on a midwifery and birth related blog am I talking about Steve Jobs?

Hugh @gapingvoid an amazing cartoonist, had an obituary for Steve Jobs on his site yesterday.  He quoted Steve Jobs in this way:

Hugh rightly said that Steve's legacy is more than the hardware, wonderful as that all is, it's what he "helped us believe about ourselves".

So important to believe we are capable, strong and courageous and that we can go beyond the boundaries and limitations imposed by upbringing, culture and the myriad other influences that seek to contain our genius and creative self expression.

Nowhere is this more important than with birth and the bringing forth of life.

Those of us who are birth activists, who care about how women are treated in the birthing world; who care about the way that babies are born and how the whole childbearing experience is constructed for women, partners/fathers and babies all over the world need to read these words of Steve Jobs and take them to heart.

We want to change the birthing world for the better and we can!

Thanks for reminding us what we are capable and who we are Steve.  RIP.