This post is all about the best Ina May Gaskin quotes.
50 Best Ina May Gaskin Quotes
For Pregnant Women
If you’re pregnant and getting ready for childbirth and breastfeeding, you surely came across Ina May Gaskin’s work (if you haven’t, you definitely should look her up asap!). Either way, to make your life easier I put together this list of 50 best Ina May Gaskin quotes that every pregnant woman should read.
Who is Ina May Gaskin?
Ina May Gaskin might just be the most famous midwife in the world. She’s an American educator, midwife, and author. She has been called “the mother of authentic midwifery.”
Books by Ina May Gaskin
“Babies, Breastfeeding, and Bonding”
“Spiritual Midwifery”
Two books I’ve read while preparing for labor, birth, and breastfeeding, which I highly, highly recommend: “Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth” & “ Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding”.
And last but not least, her latest one which was published in 2015,” Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta”.
50 Best Ina May Gaskin Quotes For Pregnant Women
Ina May Gaskin Quotes About The Power Of Positive Childbirth Stories
- “Stories teach us in ways we can remember. They teach us that each woman responds to birth in her unique way and how very wide-ranging that way can be. Sometimes they teach us about silly practices once widely held that were finally discarded. They teach us the occasional difference between accepted medical knowledge and the real bodily experiences that women have – including those that are never reported in medical textbooks nor admitted as possibilities in the medical world. They also demonstrate the mind/body connection in a way that medical studies cannot.
- ” Birth stories told by women who were active participants in giving birth often express a good deal of practical wisdom, inspiration, and information for other women.”
- “Positive stories shared by women who have had wonderful childbirth experiences are an irreplaceable way to transmit knowledge of a woman’s true capacities in pregnancy and birth.”
Ina May Gaskin Quotes About The Female Body
4. “It is important to keep in mind that our bodies must work pretty well, or there wouldn’t be so many humans on the planet.”
5. “There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we”
6. “Your body is not a lemon!”
Culture And Maternity Care
7. “The way a culture treats women in birth is a good indicator of how well women and their contributions to society are valued and honored.”
8. “The techno-medical model of maternity care, unlike the midwifery model, is comparatively new on the world scene, having existed for barely two centuries. This male-derived framework for care is a product of the industrial revolution. As anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd has described in detail, underlying the technocratic mode of care of our own time is an assumption that the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects.
9. ” Pregnancy and labor are seen as illnesses, which, in order not to be harmful to mother or baby, must be treated with drugs and medical equipment. Within the techno-medical model of birth, some medical intervention is considered necessary for every birth, and birth is safe only in retrospect.”
10. “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.”
11. “When avoidance of pain becomes the major emphasis of childbirth care, the paradoxical effect is that more women have to deal with pain after their babies are born.”
12. “The problem is that doctors today often assume that something mysterious and unidentified has gone wrong with labor or that the woman’s body is somehow “inadequate” – what I call the “woman’s body as a lemon” assumption. For a variety of reasons, a lot of women have also come to believe that nature made a serious mistake with their bodies. This belief has become so strong in many that they give in to pharmaceutical or surgical treatments when patience and recognition of the normality and harmlessness of the situation would make for better health for them and their babies and less surgery and technological intervention in birth. Most women need encouragement and companionship more than they need drugs.”
13. “My midwife partners and I at the The Farm learned by observation and experience that the presence of even one person who is not exquisitely attuned to the mother’s feelings can stop some women’s labors. All women are sensitive. Some women are extraordinarily so. We learned this truth by observing many labors stop or slow down when someone entered the birth room who was not intimate with the laboring mother’s feelings. If that person then left the room, labor usually returned to its former pace or intensity.”
14. “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?”
15. “Only rarely do doctors in training have the opportunity to sit continuously with laboring women for hours. Most are taught to intervene in the normal process so often and so early that they have never witnessed a normal labor and birth.”
16. “I have also known of weight estimates by ultrasound to be off by as much as five pounds.”
17. “The strangest request I have encountered was that of a first-time mother who—just before pushing—asked her husband for a jar of peanut butter and proceeded to eat two heaping table-spoonfuls. She then washed the peanut butter down with nearly a quart of raspberry leaf tea and pushed her baby out. I was impressed.”
18. “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.”
19. “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.”
20. “It’s easy to scare women. It’s even profitable to scare women… But it’s not nice, so let’s stop it.”
21. “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?”
22. “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.”
The Power Of Nature
23. “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.”
24. “Gardeners know that you must nourish the soil if you want healthy plants. You must water the plants adequately, especially when seeds are germinating and sprouting, and they should be planted in a nutrient-rich soil. Why should nutrition matter less in the creation of young humans than it does in young plants? I’m sure that it doesn’t.”
25. “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.”
26. “Don’t criticize nature, stand in awe of it.”
Natural Childbirth Tips
27. “If you can’t be a hero, you can at least be funny while being a chicken.”
28. “The state of relaxation of the mouth and jaw is directly correlated to the ability of the cervix, the vagina, and the anus to open to full capacity.”
29. “Breast stimulation is especially effective in starting labor at term when it is combined with sexual intercourse. Unless your partner is an abysmally poor lover, this combination is by far the most enjoyable method of induction.”
30. “Don’t forget to bring your sense of humor to your labor.”
31. “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.”
Ina May Gaskin Quotes About Childbirth As A Spiritual Journey
32. “The Creator is not a careless mechanic.”
33. “When a child is born, the entire Universe has to shift and make room. Another entity capable of free will, and therefore capable of becoming God, has been born.”
34. “I have felt incredible energy and life force through my body, and I have really been reborn a happier, healthier, and more confident person. I have learned I can choose to focus on the darker side or the lighter side of all that is around me. I choose the lighter side and have the discipline to keep it up.”
35. “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.”
36. “If a woman doesn’t look like a Goddess during labor, then someone isn’t treating her right.”
37. “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.”
38. “The energy that gets the baby in is the energy that gets the baby out.”
Postpartum
39. “I think that women can be just completely surprised by the change in them from giving birth-you have something powerful in you-that fierce thing comes up-and I think babies need moms to have that fierceness-you feel like you can do anything and that’s the feeling we want moms to have.”
40. “The suckling relationship is one of the sources of real sweetness that we have in human existence…The suckling baby can teach adults about the expression of sweet love and gratitude in a way no words can.”
41. “Step one to preventing PPD is to find time to sleep after giving birth, no matter how euphoric you feel.”
42. “Touch is the most basic, the most nonconceptual form of communication that we have. In touch there are no language barriers; anything that can walk, fly, creep, crawl, or swim already speaks it.”
Ina May Gaskin Quotes About Breastfeeding
43. “Mother’s milk is soul food for babies. The babies of the world need a lot more soul food.”
44. “It will take your breastfed baby an average of five to six months to double her birth weight.”
45. “The composition of breastmilk varies from mother to mother, and the composition of a given mother’s milk varies according to her baby’s needs.”
46. “Immunologically speaking mother’s milk is medicine as well as food.”
47. ” We women are all born with the right equipment for breastfeeding. Big breasts, tiny breasts, long nipples, flat nipples, light nipples, and dark nipples all work very well for milk-making and breastfeeding. “
48. “Mother Nature is no fool. Her design for breastfeeding provides health benefits for mothers as well as for babies. “
49. “A breastfeeding mother is multitasking every time she feeds her baby. As she nourishes her child, she loses weight at a safe rate, gains a pretty effective contraception treatment, and reduces her risk of two kinds of potentially deadly cancer and the brittle bones and subsequent fractures that can occur during the period after menopause.”
50. “Breastfeeding mothers have an obvious advantage here because the perfect food for their babies is with them at all times.”
This post was all about Ina May Gaskin quotes.
