Birth

“ Are the phantasies concerning birth in any way more vivid or frequent or of greater emotional intensity in those whose birth has been a process of difficulty and long duration than in those who have enjoyed an easy delivery? ”

“ In the dark womb where I began
My mother’s life made me a man.
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth.
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,
But through the death of some of her. ”

“ Teacher and student should be familiar with the obstetrics of this Science. To attend properly the birth of the new child, or the divine idea, you should so detach mortal thought from its material conceptions, that the birth will be natural and safe. ”

“ So delicate and faint between the quilts lay the young mother, the little Fanchon, a shining wonder still in her face, and the exquisite touch of birth on her—for when a child is born the mother also is born again. ”

“ Whoever has to give birth is sick; whoever has given birth, however, is unclean.
Ask women: one gives birth, not because it gives pleasure. The pain makes hens and poets cackle.
You creators, in you there is much uncleanliness. That is because you have had to be mothers.
A new child: oh, how much new filth has also come into the world! Go apart! He who has given birth shall wash his soul! ”

“ Birth after birth the line unchanging runs,
And fathers live transmitted in their sons;
Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds,
The same their manners, and the same their minds. 110
Till, as erelong successive buds decay,
And insect-shoals successive pass away,
Increasing wants the pregnant parents vex
With the fond wish to form a softer sex; ”

“ I mean especially on the physical side. What are our medical folk doing? There are lots of books on childbirth and the science of parturition, and the best methods of making the transition easy; but when it comes to the end of life and the event corresponding and complementary to birth, there is little except silence and dismay. ”

“ What strange circumstance is this, that two children conceived at the same time, nay, at the same moment, under the same position of the stars, have different fates which bring them to different hours of birth, whilst two children, born of two different mothers, at the same moment of time, under one and the same position of the stars, cannot have different fates which shall conduct them by necessity to diverse manners of life and of death? Are they at conception as yet without destinies, because they can only have them if they be born? ”

“ Birth has, however, so deep a meaning for the mother, as well as for her family and her friends, and is, above all, so vital to the future of the race, that it has naturally become the subject of many impressive superstitions. ”

“ And that you may not imagine Him whom He announced as God [7] to be other than Him who was born in the flesh, he adds a term referring to His birth, saying: “A child is born to us: a son is given to us.” ”

“ We have now reached a point in our discussion at which Birth and womb phantasies we may perhaps profitably pause awhile to consider a group of phantasies, which, on account of their widespread occurrence and curious character, would seem to deserve some very special attention at the hands of the psychologist and anthropologist. ”

“ If a woman gives birth, and both ears are detached, the house of the man will encounter misfortune.
If a woman gives birth, and the right ear reaches to the cheek, a weakling will be born in the man’s house. ”

“ To make the distinction, one ought to be familiar with an individual from birth, and to have some knowledge of the conditions to which he was exposed, in the period between conception and birth,—for of course a modification which takes place during that time is as truly an acquired character as one that takes place after parturition. ”

“ CHAPTER X THE BIRTH OF THE CHILD The Cause of Labor—The Course of Labor—The Stage of Dilatation—The Stage of Expulsion—The Placental Stage—The Effect of Labor upon the Child—Meddling—Justifiable Intervention—Management of Birth without the Doctor—Methods of Reviving the Child.
The birth of a child is an act of nature, an act generally performed as satisfactorily as any other bodily function. ”

“ But this, our other or second birth will take place, when we take notice of altogether different activities in us, namely, activities of love, corresponding to the knowledge of immaterial objects, between which activities there is as great a difference as there is between the material and the immaterial, flesh and spirit. And this can with even more right and truth be called the second birth, because there follows first out of this love and union an eternal and unchangeable existence, as we will show. ”

“ HAVING spoken of the various phases of woman's life up to her maturity in the preceding chapters, we have now to consider one of the most interesting of all the circumstances of her life, at once pleasing and endearing, when she is called upon to give birth to her offspring. ”

“ When this new birth takes place, the Christian Science infant is born of the Spirit, born of God, and can cause the mother no more suffering. By this we know that Truth is here and has fulfilled its perfect work. ”

“ In German, Grimm enumerates, among other phrases relating to child-birth, the following, the particular meanings and uses of which are explained in his great dictionary: Schwanger, gross zum Kinde, zum Kinde gehen, zum Kinde arbeiten, um's Kind kommen, mit Kinde, ein Kind tragen, Kindesgrosz, Kindes schwer, Kinder haben, Kinder bekommen, Kinder kriegen, niederkommen, entbinden, and the quaint and beautiful eines Kindes genesen,—all used of the mother. ”

“ Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house. ”

“ Correspondence of Natural Birth to Spiritual Birth.
It is known that the soul of man has its beginning in an ovum of the mother, is afterwards perfected in her womb, and is there encompassed with a tender body, of such a nature that the soul may suitably act by means of it in the world into which it is born. The case is similar when man is born again, that is when he is regenerated. ”

“ And, although the birth should in strictness be called the secondary beginning, while the conception might be insisted on as the primary beginning, it is still found to be equal to the conception in its efficacy, and much more complete, although later in time. For the conception may, in fact, be said to be the generation of mere human seed, but the birth that of man himself ”

“ Maternity, and the relation in which it originates, are thrust upon them by their husbands, often without regard to their spiritual or physical conditions, and often in contempt of their earnest and urgent entreaties. No joy comes to their hearts at the conception and birth of their children, except that which arises from the consciousness that they have survived the sufferings wantonly and selfishly inflicted on them. ”

“ I conceive, therefore, that to be born again, or, as it may be rendered, to be born anew, or born from above, alludes to the birth of the human family in the person of Christ Jesus, we being members of his body. ”

“ Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life. ”

“ In the last chapter Death was compared to Birth, and it was said that probably the passage of the human soul into another world, on the other side of death, exactly corresponded to Birth—to the birth of a babe into this world. ”

“ Birth was simple; it occurred on countless planets. Meek grazing creatures, fierce carnivores—the most unlikely animals gave birth to their young. It happened all the time. And the young grew up, became mature and mated. ”

“ But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady’s-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England. ”

“ It is true that the legal denotation of the term infancy is "the period front a person's birth to the attainment of the age of twenty-one years," but in common speech an infant is "a child during the first two or three years of life," whilst writers on infant mortality restrict the term to the sense employed in the text. ”

“ These tendencies begin to manifest themselves at birth—they are all potentialities with the birth of the child—and continue to develop in turn, certain ones being more pronounced in the various stages of the child's life. ”

“ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 60
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home; ”

“ Right Physical and Spiritual Conditions of Birth.—Society should insist upon the right spiritual and physical conditions for birth. It should be considered more than "a pity" when another child is born into a home too poor to receive it. ”

“ From the time of conception until the birth of her child, the mother is carefully taken care of by our medical authorities. She must lead a quiet secluded life without any excitement and must take special treatments and foods so as to build up in herself and her unborn child good health and a balanced nervous system. ”

“ The clean tongue, the clear head, and the bright eye are birth-rights of each day. ”

“ To prove that the evils and dangers attending child birth, even among the most civilized and enlightened 27portions of the human family, may be brought to a great extent within the range of man’s control, is the object of the following remarks. ”

“ The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him. ”

“ Similar conditions may be brought about by other causes as well. Take, for instance, the poor workingman or mechanic who has already six or seven children and whose wife is unusually fertile, giving birth to children year after year. ”

“ It is also the case that large numbers of infants lose their lives during, or shortly after, birth, owing to causes inherent in the conditions of birth, and practically beyond any but the most expert control. ”

“ The child is traced to the father as its Cause and perhaps to a chain of favourable outside circumstances such as a particular diet or, more immediately, a special organic aptitude or a wife apt to childbirth. ”

“ If death is a birth, then is a birth truly death. For the babe has been living through a prior stage of existence. To it the nine months passed in its mother's womb may have meant a long span of life. For time is but a relative term, and, measured against eternity, the whole period of man's sojourn on [Pg 147] earth, be it three score or four score years, is but as the puff of a single breath. ”

“ Take, then, our typical baby, lying fresh and sweet in the well aired and lighted room we suppose to be his birthright. The bones are still soft, the tender flesh and skin with little or no power of resistance. ”

“ Adolescence is a new birth, for the higher and more completely human traits are now born. ”

“ The fact that there is pain in childbirth, or, if through modern medical science, the pain is eliminated, is beside the point. Childbirth consists of a new baby coming into the world. The mother might even die, but childbirth has taken place. ”

“ The birth of a human being, ideally considered, dates from the moment when the mother first saw or heard the voice of the father of her child. Biological and medical science, under the influence of Johannes Müller, Th. ”

“ From the moment of conception, during the months of gestation, at the time of childbirth and after, changes of great interest take place in the germ of human life and in the body of the mother. Her body is marvelously fitted for the reception and development of the ovum, the embryo and the fetus through the various stages of fertilization, germination, development, maturity, to the time of the eventual exit of the child into the outer world to begin its own independent life. ”

“ The most ardent advocates of the power of maternal impressions would scarcely concede the existence of as much influence as this of the mother's mind over the child unborn, otherwise there would surely be a very absurd collection of anomalous births in the race. ”

“ In this formula for childbirth the idea is to frighten the child and coax it to come, by telling it, if a boy, that an ugly old woman is coming, or if a girl, that her grandfather is coming only a short distance away. ”

“ One can scarcely avoid the query, Is it just to place the destiny of one human being so entirely in the power of another? The power of the mother over her child, previous to birth, is absolute. Through what she eats and drinks, during gestation, she can fix the organic and constitutional tendencies of her child to health or disease, to good or evil, to happiness or misery, and thus 21control its character and destiny after it is born, during its infancy, childhood, youth and manhood. ”