Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.
History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
I wanted to deliver babies and become a midwife. I think childbirth is one of the most amazing things you could ever experience, and I loved working with people and seeing the joys in family when they welcome a new member to it. It really brought me joy to be around that.
There is nothing that anyone can say to prepare you for childbirth. Each woman's experience is so different; you never know how it will be for you!
We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.
Childbirth changed my perception of my wife. She was now the bloodied special forces soldier who had fought and risked everything for our family.
If you are a good person, you will probably be a good father. Try not to worry too much. If you don't feel apprehensive just before your first child arrives, you are abnormal. Though catastrophe doesn't come as often in childbirth as it did a few generations ago, we naturally fear it.
When one begins, as I did, to analyze men after a fairly long experience of analyzing women, one receives a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling.
I would love to live free of the fear and sadness and real desperation that I think the effect of childbirth has on women, especially because we are expected to be so concerned by 'recovery' from childbirth.
At the moment of childbirth, every woman has the same aura of isolation, as though she were abandoned, alone.