Childbearing Quotes

• Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

  Norman Mailer

  Book, Writing, Men

  1965 'Mr Mailer Interviews Himself', in the NewYork Times Book Review,17 Sep.

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• Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.

  David R. Brower

  Government, Parent, Historical

  20 Copy quote

• There are enough women to do the childbearing and the childrearing. I know of none who can write my books.

  Henry Handel Richardson

  Book, Writing, Enough

  15 Copy quote

• Biological possibility and desire are not the same as biological need. Women have childbearing equipment. For them to choose not to use the equipment is no more blocking what is instinctive than it is for a man who, muscles or no, chooses not to be a weightlifter.

  Betty Rollin

  Mom, Mother, Block

  45 Copy quote

• ...Respecting the woman as an important and valuable human being and making certain that the woman's experience while giving birth is fulfilling and empowering is not just a nice extra, it is absolutely essential as it makes the woman strong and therefore makes society strong.

  Marsden Wagner

  Strength, Inspiring, Strong Women

  44 Copy quote

• Childbearing is glorified in part because women die from it.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Women, Dies

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

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• Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children...If a woman grows weary and, at last, dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from bearing - she is there to do it.

  Martin Luther

  Children, Home, House

  7 Copy quote

• In my practice, the majority of mutation carriers choose mastectomy; however, for those without cancer, they have much more control over the timing. For younger women, we might wait until they have found a life partner, or until after childbearing. Older women who find out they carry a mutation have unwittingly escaped a large percentage of their risk, and therefore, the calculated future risk is not necessarily a daunting number.

  Kristi Funk

  Cancer, Practice, Numbers

  Source: www.marieclaire.com

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• I suppose the most important thing, the heaviest single factor in one's life, is whether one's born male or female. In most societies it determines one's expectations, activities, outlook, ethics, manners - almost everything. Vocabulary. Semiotic usages. Clothing. Even food. Women... women tend to eat less... It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still after all do all the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Children, Men, Vocabulary

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2012). “The Left Hand Of Darkness”, p.149, Hachette UK

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• Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing. Pregnancies are damaging to health, spoil the figure, wither the charms, and it's the cloud of uncertainty forever hanging over these events that darkens a husband's mood.

  Marquis de Sade

  Husband, Pregnancy, Clouds

  7 Copy quote

• Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Marriage, Joy, Frustrated

  8 Copy quote

• Feminism is really the right of women to be full human beings and to not be defined only by their childbearing function. Feminism is really the right of women to be human beings. That's it, yet that's so frightening to a lot of people. A full human being wants satisfying work and love. A full human being is entitled to both, and is not simply defined by only one aspect of her being.

  Erica Jong

  People, Feminism, Want

  "Erica Jong on Feminism for the Future". Omega Institute Interview, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 13, 2014.

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• When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.

  Lisa See

  Mother, Pain, Heart

  5 Copy quote

• I don't know who it is, probably some geek - said that when a female gets to a certain age, all her sexuality goes. She's not a vital person anymore. If you're somebody's mother you're not vital. This is such crap, because you're still a person. You still have all the things that you came into childbearing with and all that kind of stuff.

  Pat Benatar

  Mother, Age, Female

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Childbearing is the most consistent of human events. Male and female alike, we have all been gestated inside a woman's body. As a phenomenon, childbearing is seemingly eternal and universal, yet like no other it highlights the gender divide, the singularity of individual experience and sociocultural diversities.

  Joan Raphael-Leff

  Diversity, Males, Events

  Joan Raphael-Leff (2000). “Spilt Milk: Perinatal Loss & Breakdown”, p.1951, Karnac Books

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• Common morality now treats childbearing as an aberration. There are practically no good reasons left for exercising one's fertility.

  Germaine Greer

  Children, Exercise, Fertility

  Germaine Greer (1985). “Sex and destiny: the politics of human fertility”

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• By all means, there should be no children when either mother or father suffers from such diseases as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cancer, epilepsy, insanity, drunkenness and mental disorders. In the case of the mother, heart disease, kidney trouble and pelvic deformities are also a serious bar to childbearing No more children should be born when the parents, though healthy themselves, find that their children are physically or mentally defective.

  Margaret Sanger

  Mother, Children, Father

  12 Copy quote

• The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.

  George Orwell

  New York, Party, Paris

  George Orwell (1983). “1984”, p.476, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Men, Long

  Anna Quindlen (2003). “Object Lessons: One True Thing ; Black and Blue”

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• It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?

  George Orwell

  Beautiful, Why Not, Body

  George Orwell (1982). “Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four: Text, Sources, Criticism”, Harcourt

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• Childbearing, I mean, if there's no place to go to deliver your baby, then you're the one that's delivering in those unhealthy circumstances. Or if you can't get access to family planning, your chances of surviving and being able to bring your kids up if they come one right after the other, that locks you into a cycle of poverty.

  Melinda Gates

  Baby, Mean, Kids

  Interview with Jessica Grose, www.lennyletter.com. April 1, 2016.

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• The childbearing year is a thirteen month year: the two months before conception, the nine months of pregnancy, and the two months following the birth. The childbearing is a time of adjustments and fierce emotions. The childbearing year touches every season.

  Susun Weed

  Pregnancy, Years, Two

  7 Copy quote

• Simply put, when there is no home birth in a society, or when home birth is driven completely underground, essential knowledge of women’s capacities in birth is lost to the people of that society—to professional caregivers, as well as to the women of childbearing age themselves.

  Ina May Gaskin

  Home, People, Age

  45 Copy quote

• I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Python, Pet, Television

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.161, Faber & Faber

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• It [childbearing] was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.

  Germaine Greer

  Self, Evil, Our Society

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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