Midwives Quotes
"I could have reconstructed almost exactly what the lawyer, friend, or midwife was saying at the other end of the line."
"Babies come when the moon is full. If the boiled potatoes burn, it'll rain before dark."
"It had that ring of truth to it that I heard in many wives'--and midwives'--tales, a core of common sense hardened firm by centuries of observation."
"The morning the judge gave the jury its instructions and sent them away to decide my mother's fate, I overheard her attorney explain to my parents what he said was one of the great myths in litigation."
"Vulva was one of those words that in every household but ours conveyed emotion and sentiments at the same time that it suggested a simple part of the basic human anatomy for one sex or an act--like vomiting--that was a pretty basic bodily function."
"My mother parked her station wagon just off the paved road at the end of our driveway, as she did often in the winter and early spring, to ensure that she could get to her patients in a timely fashion."
"If something unexpected should occur and there's some kind of collision, we have the tools to pull the baby out of the oven."
"I've never met a midwife who carries a scalpel."
"Indeed, he is. Horrible, isn't it? They're now in their third year of labor..."
"I would hear physicians use those sorts of analogies all the time when I was growing up."
"It's sad--very sad--but these things happen."
"You can do it, you can do it, can do it, can-do-it, can-do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it, do-it!"
"I think you're making excuses not to run into Tom because you're shy."
"The hardest part was backing around the police car."
"We went straight home. And then straight to bed."
"I'll sign it," she said to my father, and she did, scrawling her name in large, proud letters.
"I am not going to hang out at the creemee stand, it's that simple."
"Sometimes women die in childbirth, just like sometimes people get sick and die."
"I guess I never got mad enough or wild enough or stoned enough to do something really crazy."
"I remember that Rand was picked up once and herded into a wagon."
"I think Rand only spent a night in jail, and he was never charged with anything."
"Stephen said it was all a formality, but I don't think anyone who's ever had state troopers show up at her house and arrest her would call 'handcuffs' a formality."
"The weirdest thing about the handcuffs was this rubber guard someone put around the chain between the bracelets."
"I just don't know how criminals ever get the hang of handcuffs."
"Every time I wiggled my thumb, the bones in my wrist rubbed against the steel."
"It struck me as the most surreal part of a completely surreal experience."
"There I was, sitting in the backseat of a state police cruiser."
"Stephen had defended the power company executive who was accused of drowning his wife in Lake Champlain."
"Vermont rarely endures more than a dozen murders a year."
"A mother can't help it. You want to feel your friend, you want to know he or she's there."
"The difference between second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter was no small distinction."
"I know what the words intentional and involuntary mean to a normal person."
"A case like this always starts out with a lot of prosecutorial energy, and it always loses momentum over time."
"I could never give that up. I never will give that up."
"A midwife by her very nature demonstrates a reckless disregard for authority, and for the established medical norms of our society."
"How we come into this world means more than any of us understand."
"Juries don't like to convict the kind of real people who might be their neighbors."
"Because I love your mother. And I want to understand what Stephen's doing to defend her."
"I didn't think I'd be scared once this thing began, but I am."
"No tomorrow." I wish I hadn't thought of that expression. It's hateful.
"I want to be there when she has her first baby so much."
"This just isn't a good time of the year for a trial like this. Everything's dying, or going brown."
"You look like you're ready," he said finally.
"Sibyl Danforth didn't kill someone," Stephen said, "she saved someone."
"Her actions weren't criminally negligent, they were courageous! She's courageous!"
"The State is going to ask you to take the word of this twenty-two-year-old apprentice over that of the defendant, an experienced midwife."
"I think at one time we were both pretty friendly."
"If I see a danger, I will never let a mother's desire to have her baby at home cloud my judgment."
"I did everything I could before I began to try and be sure that Char--the mother--had died, but the baby was still alive."
"In the end, this will just be a ... a little footnote to this whole affair."
"I cannot undo what I've done, or what I might have done."
"I had completed at least eight or nine cycles by then, and I still wasn't hearing a heartbeat in the woman--but I was getting one from the baby."
"I did everything possible to make sure the woman was dead."
"This whole business has a lot of great myths."
"It's the way those people speak when they're in the courtroom, the way they use even common words and names."
"All I could think about were the ostensible myths Stephen had shared with my father, especially the idea that some lawyers believed you could tell the verdict the moment the jury returned."
"It made complete sense to me, it reflected what I imagined was the way I would behave if I were on a jury someday."
"I know I would be unable to look at a defendant if I was about to send him to prison."
"I wished Tom were there, but he had gone to school that day."
"The last thing any of us wanted was to be on the telephone if the jury came back with a verdict."
"And of course the phone rang constantly that afternoon, which was an enormous source of frustration."
"Would I have broken down as I did if the verdict had come in the following week, would my howls have been quite so loud if the jury had deliberated throughout the weekend?"
"Would waiting the weekend have caused the same sort of emotional explosion?"
"We were called at three-twenty with the news that we should return to the courthouse."