"Normal birth to me should not be numb from the waist down and waiting for the doctor to tell you to push. There's a reason we feel it. There's a reason we need to feel it"
About this Quote
Ricki Lake is selling a kind of bodily rebellion in plainspoken language, and she does it by reframing what modern obstetrics often treats as default: numbness, passivity, and compliance. Her definition of "normal" isn’t clinical; it’s ideological. The image of being "numb from the waist down" while "waiting for the doctor to tell you to push" sketches childbirth as a managed procedure where authority sits outside the laboring person. It’s an entertainer’s line, not a policy paper, but the cultural critique lands: medicine can drift from care into command.
The repetition - "There's a reason..". - works like a mantra, insisting pain isn’t just an unfortunate side effect but meaningful data. That’s the subtext: sensation equals agency. Feeling becomes proof you’re participating, not being done-to. She’s implicitly arguing against epidurals and heavily medicalized births, but more pointedly against the power arrangement they can symbolize: the doctor as director, the mother as body-on-table.
Context matters. Lake became a prominent voice in the natural birth movement (especially through The Business of Being Born), arriving at a moment when women were publicly reassessing institutions that claimed expertise over their experiences. The line taps into that broader zeitgeist - wellness culture, distrust of impersonal systems, a desire to reclaim "natural" processes - while risking a sharp edge: it can slide into moralizing, implying that choosing pain (or avoiding it) is a measure of authenticity. That tension is why the quote sticks: it’s empowerment rhetoric with an undercurrent of judgment, wrapped in a simple, memorable contrast between feeling and being managed.
The repetition - "There's a reason..". - works like a mantra, insisting pain isn’t just an unfortunate side effect but meaningful data. That’s the subtext: sensation equals agency. Feeling becomes proof you’re participating, not being done-to. She’s implicitly arguing against epidurals and heavily medicalized births, but more pointedly against the power arrangement they can symbolize: the doctor as director, the mother as body-on-table.
Context matters. Lake became a prominent voice in the natural birth movement (especially through The Business of Being Born), arriving at a moment when women were publicly reassessing institutions that claimed expertise over their experiences. The line taps into that broader zeitgeist - wellness culture, distrust of impersonal systems, a desire to reclaim "natural" processes - while risking a sharp edge: it can slide into moralizing, implying that choosing pain (or avoiding it) is a measure of authenticity. That tension is why the quote sticks: it’s empowerment rhetoric with an undercurrent of judgment, wrapped in a simple, memorable contrast between feeling and being managed.
Quote Details
| Topic | New Mom |
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