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.

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.

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.

It's good to laugh at times that feel inappropriate.

When you destroy midwives, you also destroy a body of knowledge that is shared by women, that can’t be put together by a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of male obstetricians, because physiologically, birth doesn’t happen the same way around surgeons, medically trained doctors, as it does around sympathetic women.

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.

There is no other organ quite like the uterus. If men had such an organ they would brag about it. So should we