some of my birth favorite quotes

A Quaker friend once posed this question to me: why is breast milk so good? 

Answer: Because it is always warm, it’s always ready, and it’s up high where the cats can’t get it!
(and it is free!)

In pursuing happiness, he suggests, "We should have more trust in our own resilience and less confidence in our predictions about how we'll feel. We should be a bit more humble and a bit more brave." ~ Daniel Todd Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

“This may be the hardest part of being a doula: You have found that inner power and have seen it work a hundred or more times, but you cannot make that journey happen for another woman, no matter how much you love her.” ~ sss

“My job as a doula is to mother the mother, to be the best doula I can be; to make her feel that she succeeded with the tools that she had come with and that she was a success. She should know she did a smashing job at this birth and that I fully trust she will be an equally awesome mother, too.” ~ sss

 “If a doula were a drug, it would be unethical not to use it.”  ~ John H. Kennell 

 “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

 “The whole point of woman-centered birth is the knowledge that a woman is the birth power source. She may need, and deserve, help, but in essence, she always had, currently has, and will always have the power.” ~ Heather McCue

“Around us, life bursts with miracles--a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life's daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there.” 
~ Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet, and peace activist.

 “It's not just the making of babies, but the making of mothers that midwives [and doulas] see as the miracle of birth.” ~ Barbara Katz Rothman

 “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.” ~ Dr. Kloosterman

 “For far too many women pregnancy and birth is something that happens to them rather than something they set out consciously and joyfully to do themselves.” ~ Sheila Kitzinger

 “However much we know about birth in general, we know nothing about a particular birth. We must let it unfold with its own uniqueness. ~ Elizabeth Nobel

 “Women's strongest feelings [in terms of their birthings], positive and negative, focus on the way they were treated by their caregivers.” ~ Annie Kennedy & Penny Simkin

 “A healthy woman who delivers spontaneously performs a job that cannot be improved upon.” ~ Aidan MacFarlane, author of The Psychology of Childbirth

 “We are made to do this work and it’s not easy…. I would say that pain is part of the glory, or the tremendous mystery of life. And that if anything, it's a kind of privilege to stand so close to such an incredible miracle.” ~ Simone Taylor

 “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~Maya Angelou

 “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

“There is a secret in our culture, and it's not that birth is painful. It's that women are strong.” ~ Laura Stavoe Harm

 “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 “Sometimes the only thing that makes a woman’s pregnancy high risk is her choice of a care provider.” ~ Anonymous

 “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 Di Orio

 “Anyone who thinks women are the weaker sex never witnessed childbirth.” ~ Anonymous

 “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” ~ Mark Twain

 “Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 “You are assisting at someone else’s birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: 'We did it ourselves!'” ~ From Lao Tzu, father of Chinese Taoism, from his classic text called, Tao Te Ching: The Way of All Life, 6th Century B.C.

 “Putting women in the position of coping with conflict when they should be concentrating on having their babies counts as an intervention in itself!” ~ Unknown

 “We are the mothers, after all, the ones who speak the cultural narrative and teach it through, well, old wives' tales, which is to say, the ancient, subversive, and immediate mother tongue, the language of metaphor and myth.” ~ Ellen McLaughlin

 “The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realize a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought can reduce another person’s suffering and bring that person joy.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

 “Speak tenderly to them. Let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of our greeting. Always have a cheerful smile. Don’t only give your care, but give your heart as well.” ~ Mother Teresa

 “A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” Gandalf in JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings.

 “There is no way out of the experience except through it, because it is not really your experience at all but the baby's. Your body is the child's instrument of birth.” 
~ Penelope Leach

“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

 “Three hundred thousand women will be giving birth with you today. Relax and breathe and do nothing else. Labor is hard work; it hurts and you can do it.”~ Unknown

 “The truth for women living in a modern world is that they must take increasing responsibility for the skills they bring into birth if they want their birth to be natural. Making choices of where and with whom to birth is not the same as bringing knowledge and skills into your birth regardless of where and with whom you birth.” 
~ Common Knowledge Trust

 “Ask me for strength and I will lend not only my hand, but also my heart.”
~ Unknown

 “Mothers don’t breastfeed, babies breastfeed.  Babies know how if we let them.” 
~ Dr. Nils Bergman

“Giving birth should be your greatest achievement not your greatest fear.”
~ Jane Fraser Weideman

“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

“We've put birth in the same category with illness and disease and it's never belonged there. Birth is naturally safe, but we've allowed it to be taken over by the medical community.”
~ Carla Hartley,  Ancient Art Midwifery Institute

 “The traditional midwife believes that birth proceeds in a spiral fashion: labor starts, stops and starts, while the baby goes down, up and down, and the cervix opens, closes and opens. Nature has no design for failure; she holds her own meaning for success.” 
~ Sher Willis

 “Birthing is the most profound initiation to spirituality a woman can have.” ~ Robin Lim

There is a quote, by Laura Stavoe Harm that reads, “There is a secret in our culture and it is not that birth is painful, but that women are strong.”

More quotes coming soon

To leave comments at this blog, please email me at: ssskimchee@gmail.com

Birth: The Conference in Romania in 2019!

Birth: The Conference in Romania in 2019!
I've been invited to address an audience of young families and professionals in Romania this coming summer. I am reprinting my earlier article about them here to bring you up to speed on who these amazing people are:
I have dedicated my next book called, PUSH! The Sequel to the brave, revolutionary young families of the Muntele Rece district of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Against all odds they are taking back control of their lives and the lives of their children after Communism all but dictated their very existence. They are choosing to have their babies at home, later home schooling them, and discovering autonomy for themselves.

  It reminds me so very much of the 1960s and ’70s in America when radical hippies like Ina May and Stephen Gaskin began to question the status quo. They deserve our deepest respect and support. I can only guess that the advent of the Internet in their little villages found a willing audience in these young people. They are educated, seeking souls, so very ready for change, and when they discovered what the rest of the world has been up to until now, they ran with it. But I am curious: why weren't they attracted to our materialism, or our free market economies and consumerism instead?

 I have gotten to know many young immigrant families over the years and many of them want everything and anything that smacks of America, even at the expense of forgoing their forefathers' traditions and way of life. They strike me as even more American than we are, in a way, hankering after the very arrogance we enshrine. But this is different. The Romanian revolutionaries are peacefully considering all their options and the direction they will choose for themselves. I wonder how do they choose among all of the innovative movements they encounter while being inundated with  the glut of information the Internet has to offer? This is epic, in my eyes.  

    

I have only the highest respect and regard for this tiny movement among them. They are slowly winning midwives, doctors, and others over to their side. Their network spans the whole of the former Communist bloc countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, whose foreign policies often depended on those of the former Soviet Union.

Birth: The Romanian Conference 2019

This is a rough draft of the proposed conference:

Introduction: A Revolution

 In this talk 1970s and '80s in the US when there was a resurgence of midwifery and many felt that birth belonged in the family, not in what had become doctor and hospital models of care, essentially leaving the mother out of the process, and especially taking control of a natural process and turning it into an illness that needed to be managed medically. We will discuss what is possible in Romania today.

History of home versus hospital birth

 A look into Western allopathic medicine and our attitudes concerning alternative approaches. Many countries throughout the world have not turned to this philosophy and continue to trust Nature and what humans have successfully done for millenia. 

Maternal and infant deaths world wide

 Statistics continue to prove to this day that despite the advancements in medicine and the sciences, the outcomes of managed births in comparison to an uniterrupted natural process have not born better outcomes. The US and other so-called First World Countries actually fall at the bottom of the list for maternal and infant morbidity across the board. The US stands at the bottom of the list as 48th at this time.

Education & Training available world-wide

 We will discuss the pros and cons for training and/or depending on practitioners in your own countries. There are many schools of thought in this sphere, but I will try to give an unbiased look into all the choices out there that you might want to access. 

Creating protocols

  Are protocols needed? They just might earn you the respect that you might want from within your local medical communities. How can you work together? Is that possible? How do you draw up protocols unique to your situation? Legal issues concerning home birth.

Resources

There are thousands of books, videos, papers, studies, statistics and information on the Internet. Who do you trust? How do you find strong evidence for sane choices? I will try to consolidate the best of all this information and make those resources available throughout the conference.

WHO World Health Or and human rights--an in-depth look

     We can learn a lot from WHO, Save the Children, Unicef, and other international groups who have already been disseminating much of this education around the world and by tapping into their experience--their failures and successes--we might learn quite a lot and avoid wasting valuable time and energy. 

  

Natural birth vrs medication

   A look at what drugs are being used, what helps, what doesn't, and what are some of their properties. A study of the interventions and what they mean. We will also look at the evolution of the sciences of testing newborns and what does bonding look like in light of these so-called advances.

Perceptions of success vrs failure: realistic goals

 Again, learning from others who have been there like Ina May Gaskin, what do our goals look like? What does a successful birth look like? What are some of the very real dangers and how can you be trained to see them before you are in trouble? How can you avoid them? I was trained first, intentionally, to know what normal birth looked like, over and over and over again. Only then, when I could do it in my sleep, was I introduced to problems that might arise during pregnancy and birth. So, when my brain signaled that this was a yellow or red light, that what I am seeing now is not part of that normal, then I was trained in what to do, if I needed to actually do something, if I needed help or some maneuver I had been trained in. And, how can you learn this where you are now?

To leave comments at this blog, please email me at: ssskimchee@gmail.com

Stay tuned for my next books, PUSH! The Sequel: 37 more true stories from midwives and doulas, and Stone Age Babies in a Space Age World: Babies and Bonding in the 21st Century.

Even the Royals are Getting it Right!

Meghan Markel: doula forced to address reports she is working with Duchess Meghan Markel.

With her spring due date looming, the Duchess of Sussex will be putting together her birth plan. Previous reports claimed that Meghan has hired a doula as a well as a midwife to help deliver her baby, but it seems the speculation couldn't be further from the truth. Mother-of-three Lauren Mishcon, the doula in question, has denied the reports, explaining to The Jewish Chronicle: "It’s the result of a Facebook joke on my personal page and a very tenuous connection between my husband's grandfather and Princess Diana. The more I deny it, the more people believe it."

Earlier this week, reports of Meghan's doula surfaced in the press. The report claimed that Lauren has been helping Meghan prepare for the birth and even given Prince Harry advice on how to support his wife during labour. According to the excited chatter on the Doula UK members' website, Lauren joked on a message board: "I'm busy in spring. I could not possibly say."

Meghan is preparing to give birth in the spring

When asked by The Sun last week whether the reports are true, Lauren declined to comment. Her "tenuous" royal connection that she spoke of is that her husband is Oliver Mishcon – the grandson of solicitor Lord Mishcon, whose law firm handled the divorce of Princess Diana and Prince Charles.

It may not have come as a surprise if Meghan did choose to employ a doula. The Duchess is known to be a keen fan of yoga, mindfulness and other holistic practices. Doulas are also known as 'birth companions', 'birth coaches' or 'post-birth supporters', providing practical and emotional guidance during labour and beyond - they are not medically trained, but help mums-to-be achieve a positive birth experience.

The report comes as rumours circulate that Meghan will give birth at the Lindo Wing, like the Duchess of Cambridge. It was previously thought that Harry and Meghan would use a hospital closer to their new Windsor home, Frogmore Cottage, for the birth of their firstborn, but staff at the private maternity ward at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, have been advised not to take holiday in April, sparking speculation that Meghan plans to have her baby there.

Will the royal couple welcome their baby at the Lindo Wing?

The Duke and Duchess will relocate to their newly-renovated property in March, allowing them time to settle in before Meghan’s due date, which she previously said is late April or early May. It has been suggested that Meghan could opt for Frimley Park Hospital in Surrey, which is roughly 16 miles away or a 30-minute drive. It is where Prince Edward’s wife Sophie delivered both of her children, Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn, in 2003 and 2007.

Meanwhile, the exclusive Lindo Wing is almost an hour away and would involve driving through London traffic to get there. But Meghan could be sure of the finest treatment once she arrived; the £6,000-a-night maternity unit offers mums "five-star" treatment, with private rooms and en-suite bathrooms, and treats such as a post-delivery massage or afternoon tea to celebrate the baby’s birth.