Skip to main content

Wit & Attitude Quote by Marie Osmond

"So, babies are taken from their mothers because they get temporarily insane and it's not the mother's fault. This is the thing: they shouldn't feel ashamed. They didn't cause this. It is not something they did to themselves"

About this Quote

Marie Osmond is doing something deceptively radical here: she’s trying to rewrite the emotional script around postpartum mental health in plainspoken, almost parental language. The quote moves the listener away from the courtroom logic of blame and toward the emergency-room logic of triage. “Temporarily insane” is blunt to the point of discomfort, but that’s part of its function. It yanks postpartum illness out of the euphemism zone and insists it’s real, acute, and not a moral referendum on motherhood.

The context Osmond is gesturing at is the moment when a mother’s condition becomes so dangerous that separation is necessary. That’s the scenario people rarely want to imagine, and the stigma compounds the trauma: the cultural expectation that maternal instinct is automatic, serene, and self-sacrificing. Her phrasing pushes back against that myth. By repeating “not the mother’s fault” and “They didn’t cause this,” she’s anticipating the most common audience reaction: suspicion that the mother is either weak or somehow responsible for failing to cope.

Subtextually, she’s also protecting families from the shame spiral that keeps people silent and untreated. The repeated “they” matters: it shifts the mother from isolated “bad mom” to part of a group, a population that deserves care. As a pop figure, Osmond leverages familiarity and authority to normalize the unglamorous truth: sometimes love isn’t enough, sometimes biology and brain chemistry win for a while, and the humane response is intervention without humiliation.

Quote Details

TopicMother
SourceHelp us find the source
CiteCite this Quote

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Osmond, Marie. (n.d.). So, babies are taken from their mothers because they get temporarily insane and it's not the mother's fault. This is the thing: they shouldn't feel ashamed. They didn't cause this. It is not something they did to themselves. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/so-babies-are-taken-from-their-mothers-because-155506/

Chicago Style
Osmond, Marie. "So, babies are taken from their mothers because they get temporarily insane and it's not the mother's fault. This is the thing: they shouldn't feel ashamed. They didn't cause this. It is not something they did to themselves." FixQuotes. Accessed February 3, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/so-babies-are-taken-from-their-mothers-because-155506/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"So, babies are taken from their mothers because they get temporarily insane and it's not the mother's fault. This is the thing: they shouldn't feel ashamed. They didn't cause this. It is not something they did to themselves." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/so-babies-are-taken-from-their-mothers-because-155506/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Marie Add to List
Marie Osmond on postpartum psychosis and stigma
Click to enlarge Portrait | Landscape

About the Author

USA Flag

Marie Osmond (born October 13, 1959) is a Musician from USA.

17 more quotes available

View Profile

Similar Quotes

J.D. Salinger, Novelist
J.D. Salinger