Pregnancy Quotes

Quotes About Pregnancy From Million Quotes

 

I think that carrying a baby inside you is like running as fast as you can.  It feels like finally letting go and filling yourself up to the wildest limits.  - Author unknown, quoted in Ourselves and Our Children: A Book by and for Parents by Boston Women's Health Book Collective, 1978


There is such a special sweetness in being able to participate in creation.  - Pamela S. Nadav


Life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.  - Rita Rudner


Feeling fat lasts nine months but the joy of becoming a mom lasts forever.  - Attributed to Nikki Dalton


Let us make pregnancy an occasion when we appreciate our female bodies.  - Merete Leonhardt-Lupa


Instead of wishing away nine months of pregnancy and complaining about the shadow over my feet, I'd have cherished every minute of it and realized that the wonderment growing inside me was to be my only chance in life to assist God in a miracle.  - Erma Bombeck, "If I Had My Life to Live Over"


I usually claim that pregnant women should not read books about pregnancy and birth.  Their time is too precious.  They should, rather, watch the moon and sing to their baby in the womb.  - Michel Odent


Love is all fun and games until someone loses an eye or gets pregnant.  - Jim Cole


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


Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.  - E.B. White, Charlotte's Web, Chapter XXII: A Warm Wind


The shamans are forever yacking about their snake-oil "miracles."  I prefer the Real McCoy - a pregnant woman.  - Robert A. Heinlein


Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.  - Erma Bombeck


Giving birth and being born brings us into the essence of creation, where the human spirit is courageous and bold and the body, a miracle of wisdom.  - Harriette Hartigan


I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot which I do not wish to untie.  - Mary Wollstonecraft, letter to husband William Godwin


Now my belly is as noble as my heart.  - Gabriela Mistral


Pregnancy is a process that invites you to surrender to the unseen force behind all life.  - Judy Ford


Part of being a parent is rolling with the punches, so consider an unexpected pregnancy the universe's way of helping you to learn to do that.  - Heather Wittenberg


To be pregnant is to be vitally alive, thoroughly woman, and distressingly inhabited.  Soul and spirit are stretched - along with body - making pregnancy a time of transition, growth, and profound beginnings.  - Anne Christian Buchanan and Debra K. Kingsporn, The Quickening Heart: A Journal for Expectant Mothers


Pregnancy is getting company inside one's skin.  - Maggie Scarf


Think of stretch marks as pregnancy service stripes.  - Joyce Armor


A ship under sail and a big-bellied woman,
Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common.
- Benjamin Franklin


Love and pregnancy and riding on a camel cannot be hid.  - Arabic Proverb


You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.  - Dave Barry, "Things That It Took Me 50 Years to Learn"


Pregnant women!  They had that weird frisson, an aura of magic that combined awkwardly with an earthy sense of duty.  Mundane, because they were nothing unique on the suburban streets; ethereal because their attention was ever somewhere else.  Whatever you said was trivial.  And they had that preciousness which they imposed wherever they went, compelling attention, constantly reminding you that they carried the future inside, its contours already drawn, but veiled, private, an inner secret.  - Ruth Morgan


God's interest in the human race is nowhere better evinced than in obstetrics. - Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)


Whether your pregnancy was meticulously planned, medically coaxed, or happened by surprise, one thing is certain — your life will never be the same. - Catherine Jones


Everything grows rounder and wider and weirder, and I sit here in the middle of it all and wonder who in the world you will turn out to be.  - Carrie Fisher


A baby is something you carry inside you for nine months, in your arms for three years, and in your heart until the day you die.  - Attributed to Mary Mason, also Monica Mason and Mary Manson  (Anyone know where I can find the original?)


In the pregnancy process I have come to realize how much of the burden is on the female partner.  She's got a construction zone going on in her belly.  - Al Roker


You do a lot of growing up when you're pregnant.  It's suddenly like, "Yikes. Here it is, folks. Playtime is over."  - Connie Fioretto, quoted in Between Generations: The Six Stages of Parenthood by Ellen Galinsky, 1982


The dreams that we have in pregnancy are tainted with the worries and joys of pregnancy and the changing roles of our lives.  - Robin Elise Weiss


It seems an insult to nature and to the Creator to imagine that pregnancy was ever intended to be a sickness.  - Mrs E.B. Duffey, What Women Should Know, 1873


The baby bounced gently off the wall of her uterus.  She opened her dressing gown and put her hands back on her belly.  It moved again, like a dolphin going through the water; that was the way she imagined it.  - Roddy Doyle, The Snapper


If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternatively, there would never be more than three in a family.  - Lawrence Housman


Some men are so macho they'll get you pregnant just to kill a rabbit.  - Maureen Murphy


He plough'd her, and she cropp'd.  - William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra


The woman about to become a mother, or with her newborn infant upon her bosom, should be the object of trembling care and sympathy wherever she bears her tender burden or stretches her aching limbs.... God forbid that any member of the profession to which she trusts her life, doubly precious at that eventful period, should hazard it negligently, unadvisedly or selfishly.  - Oliver Wendell Holmes


By far the most common craving of pregnant women is not to be pregnant.  - Phyllis Diller


If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.  - Nora Ephron, Heartburn, 1983


When I had reached my term, I looked like a rat dragging a stolen egg.  - Colette


The only time a women wishes she was a year older is when she's expecting a baby.  - Mary Marsh


Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child.  She must be found and stopped.  - Sam Levenson


If men were equally at risk from this condition - if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains - then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.  - Barbara Ehrenreich


Pregnancy is a disease from which you recover in 18 years and 9 months. - Carrie Latet



Childbirth, Birth, Natural Birth, Labor, Midwives, etc


In giving birth to our babies, we may find that we give birth to new possibilities within ourselves.  - Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn, Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting


God schedules a birthday, not man.  - Robert A. Bradley


We repeatedly tell patients we are not in a hurry; there are no trains to catch and we don't care when the baby comes, only how!  A doctor who is in a hurry does not belong in the field of obstetrics.  As my chief pointed out, "An obstetrician should have a big rear end and the good sense to sit calmly thereupon and let nature take its course."  - Robert A. Bradley


Midwives have skilled hands and know how to sit on them.  - Author Unknown


Attending births is like growing roses.  You have to marvel at the ones that just open up and bloom at the first kiss of the sun but you wouldn't dream of pulling open the petals of the tightly closed buds and forcing them to blossom to your time line.  - Gloria Lemay


All natural birth has a purpose and a plan; who would think of tearing open the chrysalis as the butterfly is emerging?  Who would break the shell to pull the chick out?  - Marie F. Mongan, HypnoBirthing


Rigid plans work best if you're building a skyscraper; with something as mysteriously human as giving birth, it's best, both literally and figuratively, to keep your knees bent.  - Mark Sloan


Everything comes gradually and at its appointed hour. - Ovid


Babies are bits of star-dust blown from the hand of God.  Lucky the woman who knows the pangs of birth for she has held a star.  - Larry Barretto


We have a secret in our culture, and it's not that birth is painful.  It's that women are strong.  - Laura Stavoe Harm


There is power that comes to women when they give birth.  They don't ask for it, it simply invades them.  Accumulates like clouds on the horizon and passes through, carrying the child with it.  - Sheryl Feldman


Birthing is the most profound initiation to spirituality a woman can have.  - Robin Lim


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 DiOrio




Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect.  For what has happened?  A miracle.  You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.  - William Macneile Dixon


Birth matters.  It brings us into being, on many levels.  - Ananda Lowe


Birth takes a woman's deepest fears about herself and show her that she is stronger than them.  - Author Unknown


In the moments of labor and birth, all the forces of the universe are flowing through a woman's body.  - Sandra K. MorningStar


Birth is as safe as life gets.  - Harriette Hartigan


The power and intensity of your contractions cannot be stronger than you, because it is you.  - Author Unknown


You are pregnant and you are powerful.  You are bold and you are beautiful.  Go forward in your boldness, in your beauty and in your connectedness.  Trust your body to birth and know that the collective power of women worldwide will be with you.  - Author Unknown


Remember this, for it is as true as true gets:  Your body is not a lemon.  You are not a machine.  The Creator is not a careless mechanic.  Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo.  Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.  - Ina May Gaskin


Giving birth should be your greatest achievement not your greatest fear.  - Jane Weideman


In achieving the depersonalization of childbirth and at the same time solving the problem of pain, our society may have lost more than it has gained.  We are left with the physical husk; the transcending significance has been drained away.  In doing so, we have reached the goal which perhaps is implicit in all highly developed technological cultures, mechanized control of the human body and the complete obliteration of all disturbing sensation.  - Sheila Kitzinger, Women as Mothers


Childbirth provided the drama I craved, the thrill of peeking over the primal edge of creation, the rush of the unexpected.  - Peggy Vincent


Giving birth is not a matter of pushing, expelling the baby, but of yielding, surrendering to birth energy.  - Marie Reid


Natural childbirth has evolved to suit the species, and if mankind chooses to ignore her advice and interfere with her workings we must not complain about the consequences.  We have only ourselves to blame.  - Margaret Jowitt


Many Western doctors hold the belief that we can improve everything, even natural childbirth in a healthy woman.  This philosophy is the philosophy of people who think it deplorable that they were not consulted at the creation of Eve, because they would have done a better job.  - Gerrit-Jan Kloosterman


Midwives see birth as a miracle and only mess with it if there's a problem; doctors see birth as a problem and if they don't mess with it, it's a miracle!  - Barbara Harper


If we are to heal the planet, we must begin by healing birthing.  - Agnes Sallet Von Tannenberg


Labor is the closest a woman may ever be to the threshold between life and death while she is still very much alive.  - Anne Frye


The instant of birth is exquisite.
Pain and joy are one at this moment.
Ever after, the dim recollection is
so sweet that we speak to our children
with a gratitude they never understand.
We speak to our parents with a sorrow
unfamiliar until the day they are dying.
- Madeline Tiger, Birds of Sorrow and Joy


A strong intention, a relaxed body and an open mind are the main ingredients for an active birth.  - Janet Balaskas


Women's bodies have near-perfect knowledge of childbirth; it's when their brains get involved that things can go wrong.  - Peggy Vincent


Birth is not only about making babies.  Birth is about making mothers... strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.  - Barbara Katz Rothman


The experience of birth is vast.  It is a diverse tapestry woven by cultural customs, shaped in personal choices, affected by biological factors, marked by political circumstances.  Yet the nature of birth itself prevails in elegant design of simple complexity.  - Harriette Hartigan


Pregnancy and birth knit womankind together.  Help weave a gorgeous thread to add to the fabric.  Be supportive.  Be kind.  Be wise.  Be open.  - Desirre Andrews


Childbirth is an experience in a woman's life that holds the power to transform her forever.  Passing through these powerful gates - in her own way - remembering all the generations of women who walk with her.... She is never alone.  - Suzanne Arms


We need nothing less than a revolution in our attitudes towards conception, pregnancy, birth and parenting.  - Sophie Style


For far too many, pregnancy and birth is still something that happens to them rather than something they set out consciously and joyfully to do themselves.  - Sheila Kitzinger, The Experience of Childbirth


The effort to separate the physical experience of childbirth from the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of this event has served to disempower and violate women.  - Mary Rucklos Hampton


We must understand that childbirth is fundamentally a spiritual, as well as a physical, achievement.  The birth of a child is the ultimate perfection of human love.  - Grantly Dick-Read


Birth goes best if it is not intruded upon by strange people and strange events.  It goes best when a woman feels safe enough and free enough to abandon herself to the process.  - Penny Armstrong and Sheryl Feldman, A Midwife's Story


VITA MUTARI - the literal translation from Latin to English is "Life Transformation."  That is the closest thing I could think of the feeling of labor/birth... what you are feeling isn't pain, it's life transformation.  Is it dramatic?  You bet!  I think it should be!  - Stephanie Soderblom


Birth is the epicenter of women's power.  - Ani DiFranco


Giving birth is a transformation and it doesn't matter whether you've had eight babies before.  It's still a transformation the next time you have another baby, because you are no longer the same woman you were before you had that baby.  - Penny Handford, quoted in Mothering the New Mother by Sally Placksin


Birth is a mystery.  Words are not enough.  - Marie O'Connor


[My mother's] feeling is, we were made to do this work, and it's not easy, and it's inherently painful.... Pain and pleasure are a continuum, and without the pain, there would not be the pleasure. We wouldn't have a place to slide around, and that this is just an intense experience of pain. It's also an intense experience of pleasure, and joy and hope.... I would say that the pain is part of the glory, or the tremendous mystery of life. And that if anything, it's kind of a privilege to stand so close to an incredible miracle. And that there's pain involved because it's such a tremendous event... it's like living in a different dimension briefly. And that it's a painful process, because it's like two worlds colliding. - Simone Taylor, on childbirth, quoted in Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America by Pamela E. Klassen, 2001


Women today not only possess genetic memory of birth from a thousand generations of women, but they are also assailed from every direction by information and misinformation about birth.  - Valerie El Halta


$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.  - Frank A. Oski


The experience profoundly changed my perspective.  In the hospital, I hadn't perceived the anxiety and foreboding that permeated birth until I experienced the impact of its absence among the midwives.  The peace, wonder, and intimacy were infinitely greater.  What a compelling difference!  - Heidi Rinehart


People are giving birth underwater now.  They say it's less traumatic for the baby because it's in water. But certainly more traumatic for the other people in the pool.  - Elayne Boosler


Childbirth was probably easier for most women in early cultures, especially in hunter-gatherer societies, where everyone was accustomed to physical labor and supple and fit from daily activity.  - Suzanne Arms


According to our Lamaze instructor that winter, my body was supposed to "self-anesthetize" during labor and delivery, allowing me to remain wholly alert for the miracle of birth.  She assured our class of hefty, plural-bodied women that our cervix muscles would become "naturally numb" as they swelled and stretched, and deep breathing would turn the final explosions of pain into "manageable discomfort."  This description turned out to be as accurate as, say, a steward advising passengers aboard the Titanic to prepare for a brisk but bracing swim.  If my self-anesthesia took at all, it packed the power of two baby aspirin.  - Mary Kay Blakely, American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie, 1995


Amnesia: The condition that enables a woman who has gone through labor to have sex again.  - Joyce Armor


If you want to know the feeling, just take your bottom lip and pull it over your head.  - Carol Burnett, about labor pain, quoted in Fatherhood by Bill Cosby


I realize why women die in childbirth — it's preferable.  - Sherry Glaser


The childbirth class neglected to teach you a critical skill.  How to swear, breathe and count all at the same time.  - Linda Fiterman, From Colic to College: Chuckling Your Way Through Parenthood


I feel cheated never being able to know what it's like to get pregnant, carry a child and breastfeed.  - Dustin Hoffman


On the one hand, we'll never experience childbirth.  On the other hand, we can open all our own jars.  - Bruce Willis


They say men can never experience the pain of childbirth. They can... if you hit them in the goolies with a cricket bat for fourteen hours.  - Jo Brand


I once heard two ladies going on and on about the pains of childbirth and how men don't seem to know what real pain is.  I asked if either of them ever got themselves caught in a zipper.  - Emo Philips


A friend asked her doctor if a woman should have children after thirty-five.  I said, "Thirty-five children is enough for any woman."  - Gracie Allen



Miscarriage, Stillbirth, Neonatal Death, Pregnancy Loss, Barrenness


Miscarriages are labor, miscarriages are birth.  To consider them less dishonors the woman whose womb has held life, however briefly.  - Kathryn Miller Ridiman, Midwifery Today, 1997


Sweet little flower of heavenly birth
You were too fair to bloom on earth.
- Author Unknown


I fell in love with you when you were forming in my womb.
Now I carry you in my heart instead of my arms.
- Author Unknown


Blessed sister, beautiful one
with broken wings.
Your journey is a difficult one....
Breathe deeply and know that you are loved.
You are not alone,
though at times, you will feel like a
desolate island of grief....
You will go on...
Your wings will mend...
- Mary Burgess, "Mending Invisible Wings"


An angel in the book of life wrote down my baby's birth,
Then whispered as she closed the book "too beautiful for earth."
- Author Unknown


Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my tears to keep
My baby sleeps in Heaven's arms
Peaceful with angelic charms
Take my tears but grant me a kiss
From the angel baby I so miss.
- Author Unknown


Those who have lost an infant are never, as it were, without an infant child.  Their other children grow into manhood and womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality; but this one alone is rendered an immortal child; for death has arrested it with its kindly harshness, and blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.  - Author Unknown


Dear Lord, I would have loved to have held my babies on my lap and tell them about you, but since I didn't get the chance, would you please hold them on your lap and tell them about me?  - Author Unknown


The stricken mother, sitting by the side of the lifeless form of her first-born, will hear unmoved the words of consolation and the persuasions to resignation which are urged by one who has not suffered, even though he eloquently draw motives from the highest heaven; while the silent pressure of her hand by some humble creature who has hidden her treasure under the daisies, will inspire her with calmness and strength. - Timothy Titcomb (J.G. Holland), Gold-foil


I lay my tasks down one by one;
I sit in the silence of twilight grace.
Out of the shadows, deep and dun,
Steals, like a star, my Baby's face.
....
I will take up my work once more,
As if I had never laid it down.
Who will dream that I ever wore,
In triumph, motherhood's sacred crown?
....
Nevertheless, the way is long,
And tears leap up in the light of the sun.
I'd give my world for a cradle-song,
And a kiss from Baby—only one.
- Mary Clemmer, "The Childless Mother"


I'm hurt, hurt and humiliated beyond endurance, seeing the wheat ripening, the fountains never ceasing to give water, the sheep bearing hundreds of lambs, the she-dogs, until it seems the whole country rises to show me its tender sleeping young while I feel two hammer-blows here instead of the mouth of my child.  - Federico Garcia Lorca, Yerma  #barren  #childless