Believe me: if you are told that some experience is going to hurt, it will hurt. Much of pain is in the mind, and when a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving birth is excruciatingly painful – when she gets this information from her mother, her sisters, her married friends, and her physician – that woman has been mentally prepared to feel great agony.

— Ina May Gaskin

Ina May Gaskin Quotes

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

— Ina May Gaskin

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

— Ina May Gaskin

Don’t criticize nature, stand in awe of it.

— Ina May Gaskin

Why should nutrition matter less in the creation of young humans than it does in young plants? I’m sure that it doesn’t.

— Ina May Gaskin

It will take your breastfed baby an average of five to six months to double her birth weight.

— Ina May Gaskin

When a child is born, the entire Universe has to shift and make room. Another entity capable of free will, and therefore capable of becoming God, has been born.

— Ina May Gaskin

Let your monkey do it.

— Ina May Gaskin

Why should insurance companies continue to get away with limiting the skills that a health profession has always previously required of its members if they were to be considered fully trained?

— Ina May Gaskin

Remember this, for it is as true and 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

What I love about stories the most is the power they have to teach us of possibilities that might not occur to us without them.

— Ina May Gaskin

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.

— Ina May Gaskin

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

— Ina May Gaskin

Touch is the most basic, the most nonconceptual form of communication that we have. In touch there are no language barriers; anything that can walk, fly, creep, crawl, or swim already speaks it.

— Ina May Gaskin

Only rarely do doctors in training have the opportunity to sit continuously with laboring women for hours. Most are taught to intervene in the normal process so often and so early that they have never witnessed a normal labor and birth.

— Ina May Gaskin

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

— Ina May Gaskin

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.

— Ina May Gaskin

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

— Ina May Gaskin

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

— Ina May Gaskin

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.

— Ina May Gaskin

Believe me: if you are told that some experience is going to hurt, it will hurt. Much of pain is in the mind, and when a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving birth is excruciatingly painful – when she gets this information from her mother, her sisters, her married friends, and her physician – that woman has been mentally prepared to feel great agony.

— Ina May Gaskin
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