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“They call me Baelon the Brave,�� the prince told his wife at her bedside, “but I would sooner fight a dozen battles than do what you’ve just done.”
― George R.R. Martin, Fire & Blood

“A world that is safe for mothers is safe for all.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“Remember is the name of all children. In that name is the seed and the thaw.”
― John Larison, Whiskey When We're Dry

“When we enter the world of birth, we step across the threshold from the mundane to the sacred. Pregnancy and birth are a space between worlds �� a liminal space �� a place where you are no longer not a parent and not yet one either. This betwixt and between is sacred space within which powerful and profound events occur �� often uninvited.”
― Britta Bushnell, Transformed by Birth: Cultivating Openness, Resilience, and Strength for the Life-Changing Journey from Pregnancy to Parenthood

“Details that almost nobody else would have found interesting in the slightest, the mundane, tedious minutiae, given a new significance in their post-birth world, where each choice they made, however small, seemed life-alteringly crucial.”
― Melanie Golding, Little Darlings

“As millennial women, most of us aspire to motherhood. We grow up craving to start our own families. We are ready to use our natural instinct to nurture, love and support our own families - blended and created by us!”
― Natalie Grace Smith

“No matter how you bring a baby into the world (even through adoption), it's emotionally and physically exhausting - but somehow you find a way through.”
― Rachel Hollis, Girl Wash your Face

“People say the day your baby is born is the happiest day of your life. It certainly is for the dads. Call me crazy if you want, but the day I watched my doctor sew stitches into my torn vagina was not my favorite.”
― Teralyn Pilgrim, Don't Dance on the Toilet, and Other Things I Never Thought I'd Say to My Kids

“Every year when I take my girls in for their yearly checkup, the nurse hands me a questionnaire about their upbringing. It asks how many fruits and vegetables they eat, how much TV they watch, how much I read to them, how much physical exercise they get, etc.

Each time I see the questionnaire, I laugh and think, “Yeah. I’m not answering any of these questions honestly.”
― Teralyn Pilgrim, Don't Dance on the Toilet, and Other Things I Never Thought I'd Say to My Kids

“Every child comes to the world with its own message.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Some of the pain had subsided, but I could tell it was biding its time, tapping its foot impatiently just at the edge of my nerves, and waiting to roar back with full vengeance.”
― Tammie Painter, The Solon's Son

“Maddy wasn't a secret-keeper. She couldn't tell a lie, even when it was the socially acceptable thing to do. A friend once hounded her for details on childbirth. She endeavored to avoid the question, advising that you don't think about the experience once that precious baby is in your arms, but the lady wouldn't relent. "You're sure you want the truth?" Maddy asked. The lady nodded. "Labor is like shitting a watermelon while getting felt up by your mailman. And when it's all over, you still look pregnant.”
― Abby Fabiaschi, I Liked My Life

“Me: “Grace, what is that white stuff all over your face and arms?��
Grace: “I don’t know. It isn’t Daddy’s birthday cake.”
― Teralyn Pilgrim, Don't Dance on the Toilet, and Other Things I Never Thought I'd Say to My Kids

“Look, girls, the Easter bunny is here at the mall," I said. "Do you want to go say hello?��

Rose peeked over the picket fence around the photo area. She cocked an eyebrow. “Mom,�� she said, “Why is the Easter Bunny hiding inside that scary costume?”
― Teralyn Pilgrim, Don't Dance on the Toilet, and Other Things I Never Thought I'd Say to My Kids

“On her lips, which were dry, was a new shade of lipstick, by Tussy; her doctor had ordered her to put on lipstick and powder right in the middle of labour; he and Sloan both thought it was important for a maternity patient to keep herself up to the mark.”
― Mary McCarthy, The Group

“Clare lost her blowing rhythm and began growling, “Ow, ow, ow, ow, shit, shit, shit!�� At the end of the contraction, she fell back against her pillow scowling. “That really hurts!��

“What did they tell you in class?�� Margy said.

“That there would be discomfort. And that I should visualize my birth canal as a tunnel of golden light.��

The nurse pushed away from the rolling stool where she’d been giving Clare an internal examination. “Well! You weren’t kidding about those contractions. You’re already eight centimeters dilated.��

“Visualize your birth canal as an express elevator,�� Margy said.”
― Julia Spencer-Fleming, Hid from Our Eyes

“We say in America that we love motherhood, but that's a cruel joke. A woman is about twice as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth in America as in Britain--because the British make a real effort to save moms' lives, and we don't. Indeed, the maternal mortality rate actually began rising again in the United States around the year 2000, even as it was falling in the rest of the world. Today one of the most dangerous places in the advanced world to become pregnant is the American South, where women die in childbirth at far higher rates than, say, Spain or Sweden.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“Lucy finished her toast. "Then perhaps you should go. I'll wager he won't snap at you for trying to make conversation."
"So that she can swoon over him?" Anthony snorted. "He's fifteen years older than her."
"So? Father was fifteen years older than Mother. It's quite common for a husband to be older than a wife."
"And yet she died before him because she had too many children." Anna's smile disappeared. "She was simply worn out with it."
Lucy reached for Anna's hand. "That might be true. but as Father will no doubt remind you, that is a woman's lot in life."
Anna snatched her hand free. "That doesn't make it any better, though, does it?"
Lucy could only agree.”
― Catherine Lloyd, Death Comes to the Village

“Birth, while transcendent, otherworldly, spiritual, and profound, is actually intense hard work that tests our ideas of what “spiritual�� looks like and means. Birth exposes the sacred through the muck, mud, and hardship of something so profoundly animalistic that it makes us into something entirely new. This otherworldly place where great transformation happens is the sacred space of birth.”
― Britta Bushnell, Transformed by Birth: Cultivating Openness, Resilience, and Strength for the Life-Changing Journey from Pregnancy to Parenthood

“Arachnoiditis is the Queen of invisible disabilities”
― Dinara Farina, Stabbed in the Back: Are childbirth epidurals really safe?

“Unfortunately, aging, and especially aging combined with a history of childbirth, does a number on a woman’s breasts. Skin loses elasticity with age, and the thick, firm breast tissue of youth gets replaced by soft, shapeless fat, especially after having children and going through menopause. Breast-feeding can cause the breasts to undergo massive fluctuations in size, which stretches out the skin. Gravity works every second of every minute of every day to pull breasts downward.”
― Anthony Youn, The Age Fix: A Leading Plastic Surgeon Reveals How To Really Look Ten Years Younger

“Mama says at every birth, death is in the room. You can try to ignore it, or you can acknowledge it, and greet it like a guest, and then you won't be so afraid anymore."
Bee looked skeptical.
"How do you greet it? 'Hello, Death'?"
"She pictures the last patient she lost," I said. "The death that's freshest in her mind. She pictures that woman standing right there in the room with her. She looks the woman up and down. She doesn't say anything, but sometimes she gives a little nod. Then she's ready for the birth.”
― Anna North, Outlawed

“I felt like my sister, when she had first given birth to Thomas. "It's like I'm looking through a funnel," she had said, gazing at his newborn form. "The world has just shrunk to me and him.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Research among aristocratic women has produced the statistics that 45% died before the age of fifty,one quarter from the complications of childbirth; these figures do not however allow the debilitations caused by consent parturition.Many women must have died of diseases and conditions related to "the pain and the perel",worn through by ceaseless child-bearing,who didn't actually die in labour.”
― Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel

“THE CHILD GUSHED out from twixt Vern’s legs ragged and smelling of salt. Slight, he was, and feeble as a promise. He felt in her palms a great wilderness—such a tender thing as he could never be parsed fully by the likes of her.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“In the context of this verse, the definition of “sanctification,�� according to Oxford Languages, is, “the action of making or declaring something holy�� or “the action or process of being freed from sin or purified.�� Applying these definitions to hermeneutics, it may be observed that giving birth has nothing to do with being freed from sin or being set apart as holy. In fact, Jeremiah 19:3-5 mentions, “This is what the LORD, the God of HOSTS, the God of Israel says, ‘I am going to bring such disaster to this place (Judah) that the ears of all who hear of it will ring, because they have abandoned me and made this a foreign place�� they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built high places to Baal on which they burn their children in fire as offerings to Baal…�� As seen in the verse, people burned their children as sacrifices to Baal, a foreign idol. Among that crowd may have been women or husbands who received the consent of their wives to sacrifice their children. In order for those women to have any children to sacrifice to Baal in the first place, they had to undergo the process of childbirth. If one was to say that women would be directly sanctified through childbirth, that would be a misinterpretation, because if sanctification represents the process of being set apart as holy or being freed from sin, then that would mean that those women should have been holy and should have been freed from sin, but instead they were sacrificing to a foreign idol.”
― Lucy Carter, Feminism and Biblical Hermeneutics

“He watched her pace the floor in her bare feet---the floor she'd scrubbed clean seven times now from the mess and afterbirth of new babies.

She'd gotten out the stains [...] in the floor she was pacing now, walking up and down the ordinary wooden boards with bare feet like Moses at the burning bush. Like something sacred had happened there; holy ground.”
― Allie Ray, Children of Promise

“Wars and riots and mutinies, famine, disaster and the crash of dynasties - the process of birth stopped for none of these things.”
― M.M. Kaye, Shadow of the Moon

“Designer Baby -

You lay on the exam table, warm jelly on your stomach. The nurse's eyes crinkle at the corners. "Are we deciding the sex today?"
Allen grins. "Yes, a boy!"
You groan. "Do we have to choose? Can't we at least leave this to fate?”
― Ria Rees, One Hundred: Words / Days / Stories

“So I take it you’re not one of those women who wants to birth a basketball team?��
“I can think of nothing worse.”
― Chandra Blumberg, Stirring Up Love