Birth

When I was born I drew in the common air, and fell upon the earth, which is of like nature, and the first voice which I uttered was crying, as all others do. ~ Wisdom of Solomon

Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she abandon to cries and lamentations. ~ Pliny the Elder

Birth, also known as parturition, is the act or process of bearing or bringing forth offspring.

Quotes

• BIRTH, n. The first and direst of all disasters. As to the nature of it there appears to be no uniformity. Castor and Pollux were born from the egg. Pallas came out of a skull. Galatea was once a block of stone. Peresilis, who wrote in the tenth century, avers that he grew up out of the ground where a priest had spilled holy water. It is known that Arimaxus was derived from a hole in the earth, made by a stroke of lightning. Leucomedon was the son of a cavern in Mount Aetna, and I have myself seen a man come out of a wine cellar.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• It is alleged that I was born in Granger, Utah, in 1883, on the 24th of October. I was there but do not remember the event. However, my mother was an honest woman and I must take her word.
  • Hugh B. Brown

• He is born naked, and falls a whining at the first.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I, Section II. Mem. 3. Subsect. 10.

• A man is born alone and dies alone.
  • Chanakya, in Chanakya Niti, p. 13

• Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
  • Richard Dawkins Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Allen Lane. 1998. ISBN 9780713992144.

• Population growth results first and foremost from the physical labour that only the biological female can perform. This labour, which is performed by the woman’s body, can be described as reproductive labour and it includes the processes of menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. These have been defined as natural processes or events, things that just happen, rather than as work performed by the woman, but like all other forms of labour these activities require energy and drain physical resources. The decline in levels of fertility that has taken place throughout much of the world has been decline in the level of this reproductive labour, but most scholars dismiss the notion that women had or have a particular motivation to reduce fertility. The pains and pleasures of the body are assumed to be perennial factors that are always present and therefore do not create change. However, changes in fertility rates show us that the burden of reproductive labour borne by the average woman has risen and fallen sharply over generations.
  • Cook, Hera, “The long sexual revolution: English women, sex and contraception 1800-1975”, Oxford University Press, 2004, "Ch.1 Birth Rates and Women’s Bodies: Reproductive La-bour", p.11

• Compared with controls, PP cases had odds ratios of 95 for previous preterm birth, 186 for abortion and prematurity and 158 for fetal loss, abortion/prematurity after controlling for confounding variables. Compared with controls, PTB cases had an odds ratio of 96.5 for previous preterm delivery, 84 for abortion and prematurity, and 320 for fetal loss/abortion and prematurity after controlling for confounding variables.
  Conclusions: Previous preterm delivery, abortion and prematurity and fetal loss/abortion and prematurity all increase risk for subsequent preterm birth with or without PROM.
  • E E Ekwo, C A Gosselink, A Moawad; “Previous pregnancy outcomes and subsequent risk of preterm rupture of amniotic sac membranes”, Br J Obstet Gynaecol. 1993 Jun;100(6):536-41.

• Only the male superior position was significantly associated with preterm premature rupture of membranes (odds ratio 2.40, 95% confidence interval 1.16 to 4.97) and preterm delivery without premature rupture of membranes (odds ratio 1.82, confidence interval 1.02 to 3.25) after confounding variables were controlled for. No sexual positioning or sexual activities related significantly to term premature rupture of membranes.
  • E E Ekwo, C A Gosselink, R Woolson, A Moawad, C R Long; “Coitus late in pregnancy: risk of preterm rupture of am-niotic sac membranes”, Am J Obstet Gynecol. 1993 Jan;168(1 Pt 1):22-31.

• Moreover, the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in a footnote Freud added to the Second Edition in 1909 (see Psychoanalytic Pioneers, p. 46.)

• Only about one-half of the 123 million women who give birth each year receive antenatal, delivery and newborn care. But, even many of those who get care do not receive all the components of care they need (including routine care and care for complications).
  • "Facts on Investing in Family Planning and Maternal and Newborn Health" (PDF). Guttmacher Institute. 2010. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 March 2012. Retrieved 24 May 2012. p.2

• For the generation under age 35, nearly half of all births are now outside marriage. This family structure, once common mainly among African-Americans and the poor, is spreading across races and into the middle class.
  Factor in education, though, and the difference is stark, raising concerns of a new class divide. Among young women without a college degree — those like Michelle Sheridan — 55 percent of births are outside marriage, according to an analysis by the research group Child Trends. For those with at least a four-year degree, it's just 9 percent.
  • Jennifer Ludden, “For More Millennials, It's Kids First, Marriage Maybe”, Morning Edition, NPR, (October 16, 2014).

• Mean labor pain scores were significantly higher in control group than immersion bath (IB) group suggest that use of IB as an alternative form of pain relief during labor. WI in primipara at any stage of labor, from 2 cm external opening of the uterine cervix, significantly decreased parturition duration compared with traditional delivery. It raised both the amplitude and frequency of uterine contractions proportional to uterine cervix gaping with no disturbances in contraction activity of the uterus. A 3-cm gaping of uterine cervix is the optimal timing for WI in the primipara because earlier WI at 2-cm uterine cervix gaping also accelerated the labor but required repetitions of WI or use of oxytocin for correcting weakened uterine contraction.
  In contrast, IB did not influence the length of labor and uterine contractions frequency. However, contractions length was statistically shorter in IB and it can be an alternative for woman's comfort during labor, since it provides relief to her without interfering on labor progression or jeopardizing the baby.
  WI during first stage of labor reduces the use of epidural/spinal/paracervical analgesia/anesthesia compared with controls and there is no evidence of increased adverse effects to fetus/neonate or woman from laboring in water or water birth. Neonatal swimming can accelerate babies growth in early stage. In a microbiological study, comparing neonatal bacterial colonization after water birth to conventional bed deliveries with or without relaxation bath showed no significant difference between three groups in neonatal outcome, infant's and maternal infection rate.
  • A Mooventhan and L Nivethitha; “Scientific Evidence-Based Effects of Hydrotherapy on Various Systems of the Body”, N Am J Med Sci. 2014 May; 6(5): 199–209.

• You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• The birth of a child that a woman says was unplanned—either mistimed or unwanted—at the time of its conception is a clear indication of a mismatch between reproductive intentions and outcomes. DHSs ask every woman who had any live births during the past 5 years to think back to the time she became pregnant and to say if she had wanted to become pregnant then, did not want to until later, or did not want to have any (more) children at all. Because interviewers refer to the child by name when asking about each pregnancy, women may redefine pregnancies that were unwanted at the time they occurred as having been wanted (perhaps less so for those that were mistimed). Even so, despite this almost certain bias, the proportions of births that women say were unwanted at conception range from 5% or fewer in 13 sub-Saharan African countries and in Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, up to 20% or more in Malawi, Yemen, Nepal, Cambodia, Haiti, Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Proportions of births unplanned (unwanted plus mistimed) are far higher, exceeding half of all births in 9 of the 67 countries in developing regions for which data are available.
  • Dixon-Mueller R, Germain A (January 2007). "Fertility regulation and reproductive health in the Millennium Development Goals: the search for a perfect indicator". American Journal of Public Health. 97 (1): 45–51. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2005.068056. PMC 1716248. PMID 16571693.

• There are two most powerful days in your life: the day you're born, and the day you discover why.
  • Boniface Mwangi, The day I stood up alone, at TEDGlobal 2014.

• The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.
  The fulfillment of this duty has always posed problems to the conscience of married people, but the recent course of human society and the concomitant changes have provoked new questions. The Church cannot ignore these questions, for they concern matters intimately connected with the life and happiness of human beings.
  • Paul VI, "Humanae vitae: Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Regulation of Birth", (July 25, 1968), Vatican, “Introduction”, n.1

• If a true Christian mother weigh well these things, she will indeed understand with a sense of deep consolation that of her the words of Our Savior were spoken: "A woman...when she hath brought forth the child remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world;" and proving herself superior to all the pains and cares and solicitudes of her maternal office with a more just and holy joy than that of the Roman matron, the mother of the Gracchi, she will rejoice in the Lord crowned as it were with the glory of her offspring. Both husband and wife, however, receiving these children with joy and gratitude from the hand of God, will regard them as a talent committed to their charge by God, not only to be employed for their own advantage or for that of an earthly commonwealth, but to be restored to God with interest on the day of reckoning.
  • Pope Pius XI, "Casti Connubii: Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Christian Marriage", (December 31, 1930), Vatican, “II. BLESSINGS AND BENEFITS OF MATRIMONY”, p.5

• Before becoming someone’s wife, I need to be a daughter first. I owe it to the one who gave me birth and life.
  • Sanu Sharma, Daughter

• As some divinely gifted man,
  Whose life in low estate began,
  And on a simple village green;
  Who breaks his birth's invidious bar.
  • Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849), Canto 64.

• The present exploratory study measured pain and tactile thresholds in response to mechanical stimu-lation of the hand before labor, during labor, and after parturition in women. In women who had Lamaze childbirth preparation (but not in women who did not have childbirth preparation), pain thresholds were significantly higher during labor (determined up to 8 cm cervical dilatation) than prior to labor and 24 hours postpartum. Tactile thresholds did not change during any of these conditions. These findings support earlier findings in this laboratory that vaginocervical mech-anostimulation elevated pain thresholds in human and animal subjects, and more recent findings that pain thresholds increased in rats during delivery of individual young. The present findings suggest that an endogenous process that attenuates the pain of parturition is activated when the cervix dilates during labor.
  • Beverly Whipple, John B.Josimovich, Barry R.Komisaruk; “Sensory thresholds during the antepartum, intrapartum and postpartum periods”, International Journal of Nursing Studies, Volume 27, Issue 3, 1990, pp.213-221

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 70.

• Esaw selleth his byrthright for a messe of potage.
  • Chapter heading of the Genevan version and Matthew's Bible of Genesis XXV. (Not in authorized version).

• And show me your nest with the young ones in it,
  I will not steal them away;
  I am old! you may trust me, linnet, linnet—
  I am seven times one to-day.
  • Jean Ingelow, Songs of Seven, Seven Times One.

• Lest, selling that noble inheritance for a poor mess of perishing pottage, you never enter into His eternal rest.
  • William Penn, No Cross no Crown, Part II, Chapter XX, Section XXIII.

• Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she abandon to cries and lamentations.
  • Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book VII, Section II.

• The dew of thy birth is of the womb of the morning.
  • The Psalter. Psalms. CX. 3.

• "Do you know who made you?" "Nobody, as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added—
  "I 'spect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me."
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter XXI.

• When I was born I drew in the common air, and fell upon the earth, which is of like nature, and the first voice which I uttered was crying, as all others do.
  • Wisdom of Solomon, VII. 3.

See also

• Abortion
• Birth control
• Children
• Fathers
• Mothers
• Parents