Home > Topic > the birth canal
1 " She's as plastic as you are! I'm telling you, it's a bad idea. If the two of you have kids, they'll come out of the birth canal with Fisherprice stamped on their butts! "
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips , Match Me If You Can (Chicago Stars, #6)
2 " Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby's head through such a tight space it must be born while it's brain is still small - and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding. "
― Bill Bryson , A Short History of Nearly Everything
3 " Understanding why so many western women are giving birth to unnaturally large babies that either damage the birth canal or will not fit down it is one of the greatest challenges to modern medicine. "
― Steven Magee
4 " There she was, up on that bed pushing and pushing just as they’d practiced. She was dilated and the tension had been building to this moment all day. He had never been so glad to be a writer. It meant that he could be here and he could be at home, helping her as much as he liked after the baby was born. Wendy was sweating and bleary-eyed, focusing so very hard on the movement of her baby down the birth canal that it took her a moment to hear what anyone said to her. The pain was clearly unimaginable and he wished he could have taken some of it from her, but she’d insisted on a natural birth and that’s just what she was doing.“Are you okay, Babe?” She’d grown extra quiet in the last few moments, tension lines growing deeper in her face, her hands clawing at the bed rails as she pushed. She was trying so hard to endure and to get through that he had to ask again. “Are you okay?”She looked at him from the bed with all the nurses and the doctor flitting about the room watching her vital signs, monitoring the baby’s heart rate and her own and of course, guiding the course of the birth itself. She said something he barely heard. “No, no something is…”and then they all knew. "
― Amanda M. Lyons , Wendy Won't Go
5 " Girls should be taught at school that giving birth to an unnaturally over-sized western baby that no longer fits down the birth canal may lead to a multitude of long term health problems. "