50 Midwife Quotes Celebrating Those That Deliver

By Clifton Sankofa | Published July 15, 2023

Feel the love with our midwife quotes.

Midwives are essential to the human birthing process, so why do so few people know about their awesomeness?

Find out more with our midwife quotes below.

What is a midwife?

Midwives are experts in the birthing process.

They work hand in hand with obstetricians and deliver babies all over the planet.

Check out these interesting facts about midwives below:

Only 4% of US births use midwives.
A midwife attends to 75% of births in Europe.
100% of countries providing universal prenatal care have lower infant mortality rates than the US.

What do midwives do?

Midwives do a lot.

Depending on where you were born on planet Earth, you can thank a midwife for assisting with your birth.

Midwives are very popular globally but are not as widely used in the United States.

They assist the family, the doctors, the mother, and the newborn child.

Midwives are trained in diverse knowledge sets beyond just birthing, as they provide both prenatal and postpartum care.

A midwife will monitor both the child and mother during the pregnancy and labor.

They provide support, manage complications, manage pain, and perform episiotomies.

How old is the art of midwifery?

Midwifery is as old as human civilization.

Determined women have always assisted with childbirth.

Midwifery has been around for generations.

In modern times, New York City was the first to require midwives to be licensed as early as 1716.

For many years midwives have been acknowledged for their unique skill set and vast experience with birth.

Even the most advanced doctors still look to midwives for guidance and assistance in the birthing process.

French obstetrician Michel Odent once said, “The best situation I know for an easy birth is when there is nobody else around than an experienced, motherly, and silent midwife who does not behave like a guide or an observer.”

Check out our midwife quotes below to learn more about this noble calling.

Short midwife quotes about courageous miracle workers

Midwives have a complex and essential task.

1. “I still deliver like a midwife.” — Drake

2. “Midwifery is the very stuff of drama.” — Jennifer Worth

3. “The writer is the midwife of understanding.” — Arundhati Roy

4. “Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine?” — Jennifer Worth

5. “As a midwife, I am immersed in Oxytocin day and night.” — Robin Lim

6. “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” — Karl Marx

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

8. “Pain is God’s midwife, that helps some virtue into existence.” — Henry Ward Beecher

9. “To rediscover midwifery is the same as giving back childbirth to women.” — Michel Odent

10. “If we want to find safe alternatives to obstetrics, we must rediscover midwifery.” — Michel Odent

The top midwife quotes for birthing a brighter future

Midwives are essential to human civilization.

11. “In all cultures, the midwife’s place is on the threshold of life.” — Sheila Kitzinger

12. “Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers.” — Barbara Katz Rothman

13. “We are meant to midwife dreams for one another. Success occurs in clusters” — Julia Cameron

14. “Midwives and doctors play a crucial role preventing unnecessary maternal deaths.” — Liya Kebede

15. “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant, and a bastard.” — Billy Wilder

16. “I am just one of many many thousands of midwives, who are devoted to saving lives gently.” — Robin Lim

17. “The greatest privilege of a human life is to become a midwife to the awakening of the Soul in another person.” — Plato

18. “We should work to guarantee that there is a midwife or health worker by every woman’s side during childbirth.” — Liya Kebede

19. “It’s not just the making of babies, but the making of mothers that midwives see as the miracle of birth.” — Barbara Katz Rothman

20. “Imagine the future if surgical teams were at the service of the midwives and the women instead of controlling them.” — Michel Odent

The best midwife quotes about service to others

Midwives are the ultimate service to others oriented profession.

21. “Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas.” — Clifton Fadiman

22. “In a nutshell, I am a mom, a grandma, and a midwife.” — Robin Lim

23. “The people making country music today might not even know that it all started with a midwife.” — Ketch Secor

24. “I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can’t understand anything I write.” — Sylvia Plath

25. “The one seeks a midwife to deliver his thoughts, the other, someone to assist: thus a good conversation comes into being.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

26. “A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.” — Jean Renoir

27. “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships, or trains.” — Alain de Botton

28. “A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.” — Clifton Fadiman

29. “I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.” — H. L. Mencken

30. “Government schooling has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community.” — John Taylor Gatto

Famous midwife quotes about the rockstars of birthing

Midwives go unappreciated by the masses, who remain ignorant of their importance.

31. “If birth matters, midwives matter.” — Ina May Gaskin

32. “Poets are the mad midwives to reality.” — Dan Simmons

33. “The listener is the midwife in the difficult birth of the word.” — Mesa Selimovic

34. “There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife, a tyrannical midwife.” — Stephen Spender

35. “Like a midwife, I make my living bringing new babies into the world, except that mine are new advertising campaigns.” — David Ogilvy

36. “When all infrastructure falls apart, when the hospitals and all their technological equipment are destroyed, midwives come in handy.” — Robin Lim

37. “Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry took its place among the elements.” — Sylvia Plath

38. “Talk and write in a way that encourages the mutual exchange of ideas and acts like a midwife to people birthing their own ideas.” — Grace Lee Boggs

39. “[Midwives] can help women give birth with or without electricity, running water, equipment even shelter is optional. When babies are ready, they come.” — Robin Lim

40. “One of the marks of a truly vigorous society is the ability to dispense with passion as a midwife of action the ability to pass directly from thought to action.” — Eric Hoffer

Midwife quotes and sayings about life and health

It is poor judgment to think we can continue our species without the support of midwives.

41. “Prayer is the midwife of mercy, that helps to bring it forth.” — Matthew Henry

42. “I was not the midwife of the Law School, but its fraternal twin.” — Norman Lamm

43. “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” — John Dewey

44. “No times were more dangerous than when our country was born when revolution was our midwife.” — Daniel Inouye

45. “Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife.” — Jostein Gaarder

46. “In Europe, there are hospitals where the cesarean rate is less than 10%, and you’ll find midwives in these hospitals.” — Ina May Gaskin

47. “It would be a mistake, though, to consider care by family doctors or midwives inferior to that offered by obstetricians.” — Ina May Gaskin

48. “Obstetricians need not refer care to a family physician or midwife if no complications develop during a course of labor.” — Ina May Gaskin

49. “Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.” — Jennifer Worth

50. “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.” — Ina May Gaskin