Top 54 Ina May Quotes
#1. Ina May Gaskin is the most important person in maternity care in North America, bar none.
Marsden Wagner
#2. Many midwives work as employees in large hospital practices, where the techno-medical model of care is still the rule. In practices like these, midwives are used to attract women who desire midwifery care, but they may in fact be under constant pressure to practice within the techno-medical mode.
Ina May Gaskin
#3. When you cast doubt on some bodily function- you don't know how sensitive the body is to that kind of idea.
Ina May Gaskin
#5. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#6. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#7. It does a man good to see his lady being brave while she has their baby ... it inspires him.
Ina May Gaskin
#8. I dreaded having a boring life when I grew up. And I certainly can't complain about being bored.
Ina May Gaskin
#9. Don't forget to bring your sense of humor to your labor.
Ina May Gaskin
#10. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#11. ... in the ordinary course of a healthy labour, the mouth of the uterus opens by some secret agency; or at least without any apparent force.
Ina May Gaskin
#12. Dear Lord, make us truly grateful for what it is that we are about to receive.
Ina May Gaskin
#13. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#14. 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
#15. I kept thinking while I was pushing, I'm going to get huge. I'm going to get huge! she said.
Ina May Gaskin
#16. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#17. 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
#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.
Ina May Gaskin
#19. The energy that gets the baby in is the energy that gets the baby out.
Ina May Gaskin
#20. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#21. 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
#22. I'm really a scientist. I follow recipes exactly - until I decide not to. And then I'll follow something else exactly. I may decide I could turn this peach tart into a plum tart, but if I'm following a recipe, I follow it exactly.
Ina Garten
#23. 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?
Ina May Gaskin
#24. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#26. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#27. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#28. I know of no country in the world that has passed a law specifically denying a woman's right to choose where she intends to give birth.
Ina May Gaskin
#29. If a woman doesn't look like a Goddess during labor, then someone isn't treating her right.
Ina May Gaskin
#30. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#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
#32. 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
#33. 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?
Ina May Gaskin
#34. It is important to keep in mind that our bodies must work pretty well, or their wouldn't be so many humans on the planet.
Ina May Gaskin
#35. It will take your breastfed baby an average of five to six months to double her birth weight.
Ina May Gaskin
#36. I have also known of weight estimates by ultrasound to be off by as much as five pounds.
Ina May Gaskin
#37. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#38. It's easy to scare women. It's even profitable to scare women ... But it's not nice, so let's stop it.
Ina May Gaskin
#39. It's good to laugh at times that feel inappropriate.
Ina May Gaskin
#40. If you can't be a hero, you can at least be funny while being a chicken.
Ina May Gaskin
#41. Why in the world do the insurance companies get to be the boss of birth? That's what I want to know.
Ina May Gaskin
#42. I had to learn not to let anyone push me around, to be brave and to say things I knew might make people mad.
Ina May Gaskin
#43. Squat 300 times a day, you're going to give birth quickly.
Ina May Gaskin
#44. There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we
Ina May Gaskin
#46. An Rh negative mother's blood is said to be "sensitized" when this process has taken place. Procedures such as amniocentesis, aggressive external version, and episiotomy increase the chances of sensitization.
Ina May Gaskin
#48. What I love about stories the most is the power they have to teach us of possibilities that might not occur to us without them.
Ina May Gaskin
#49. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
#50. Step one to preventing PPD is to find time to sleep after giving birth, no matter how euphoric you feel.
Ina May Gaskin
#51. Whenever and however you give birth, your experience will impact your emotions, your mind, your body, and your spirit for the rest of your life.
Ina May Gaskin
#52. It's very rare to see an undisturbed birth in a modern U.S. teaching hospital, but when you see a woman who isn't frightened, who's giving birth without interference, you stand back in awe and realize how little needed you are except in the rare circumstance.
Ina May Gaskin
#53. We midwives and physicians have a lot to teach each other.
Ina May Gaskin
#54. 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.
Ina May Gaskin
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
