2011 - Talk Birth

‎”Remember our heritage is our power; we can know ourselves and our capacities by seeing that other women
have been strong.” - Judy Chicago
”For months I just looked at you. I wondered about all the mothers before me–if they looked at
their babies the way I looked at you. In an instant I knew what moved humankind from continent to
continent, Against all odds.” –Michelle Singer (in We’Moon 2011 datebook)
‎”I use the word midwife to refer to all birth practitioners. Whether you are a mother, doula, educator,
or understanding doctor or nurse you are doing midwifery when you care for motherbaby.” –Midwifery
Today editorial by Jan Tritten
”Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.” - Dorothy Allison
”I invite people to examine their lives, knowing that it’s scary, but that not doing it is even scarier.”
- Barbara De Angelis”There isn’t a lot you actually *need* to do to birth, but there is a lot you can do to
get in the *way* of birth...” –Elizabeth McKeown
‎”Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible.” –Marion C. Garretty
‎”As a woman, you are powerful. Birth is of course only one of many amazing pieces of being female,
but it is unique in some very key ways...it is a time in a woman’s life that requires physical, spiritual,
and emotional strength. It tests the foundation of who we believe we are as women, and challenges our
beliefs about our own power.” –Marcie Macari (She Births)
‎”And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as
daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one
mother and one father.” - Black Elk (via [2]Literary Mama)
‎”We must act to keep the knowledge and the powers of women alive.” - Lynn Andrews
‎”Doctors ’know’ they are giving women ’the best care’...Birth activists...know that this ’best care’ is
too often a travesty of what birth can be. And yet on that existential brink, I tremble at the birth activist’s
coding of women as ’not knowing.’ So, here’s to women...to women knowing what is best for themselves and
their babies, and to women rising above everything else.” -Robbie Davis-Floyd
“The natural process of birth sets the stage for parenting. Birth and parenting mirror each other.
While it takes courage and strength to cope with labor and birth, it also takes courage and strength to
parent a child.” –Marcy White
“For each of us as women, there is a deep place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit
rises…Within these deep places, each one holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined
and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us…it is dark, it is ancient,
and it is deep.” –Audre Lorde
‎”Time stands still best in moments that look suspiciously like ordinary life.” –Brian Andreas (quoted
in Momfulness)
‎”Your children love you. Be the trampoline for their rocketing and the cupped palms for their re-
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