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.

I kept thinking while I was pushing, I’m going to get huge. I’m going to get huge!” she said.

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.

We are, indeed, fully prepared to believe that the bearing of children may and ought to become as free from danger and long debility to the civilized woman as it is to the savage. – Thomas Huxley.

Why in the world do the insurance companies get to be the boss of birth? That’s what I want to know.

Step one to preventing PPD is to find time to sleep after giving birth, no matter how euphoric you feel.

If you can’t be a hero, you can at least be funny while being a chicken.

Dear Lord, make us truly grateful for what it is that we are about to receive.

Contrary to myth, for instance, intrinsic physical characteristics only rarely interfere with the capacity to give birth. In other words, your pelvis is probably big enough for vaginal birth. Nearly every woman’s is. Mental attitudes and emotions, on the other hand, interfere with the ability to give birth far more than is generally understood.

Mother’s milk is soul food for babies. The babies of the world need a lot more soul food.