Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has a single solution: that is, pregnancy.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra
In pregnancy, there are two bodies, one inside the other. Two people live under one skin.... When so much of life is dedicated to maintaining our integrity as distinct beings, this bodily tandem is an uncanny fact.
JOAN RAPHAEL-LEFF, Pregnancy: The Inside Story
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
ERICA JONG, Fear of Flying
Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, Essays and Aphorisms
If men were equally at risk from this condition—if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains—then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.
BARBARA EHRENREICH, The Worst Years of Our Lives
Because they've either conveniently forgotten with time or they're trying to be supportive, most mothers won't tell you how hard pregnancy (and then childbirth) can be. Let me tell you, it is. It's brutal sometimes! But, if I did it, ANYONE can do it. I mean, I always knew I was meant to do something really BIG in life, and now I know that this was it. Screw winning an Academy Award someday ... I GAVE BIRTH!
JENNY MCCARTHY, Belly Laughs
Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman’s sexuality. Every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a chthonian force beyond her control. In the welcome pregnancy, this is a happy sacrifice. But in the unwanted one, initated by rape or misadventure, it is a horror. Such unfortunate women look directly into nature’s heart of darkness. For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way.
CAMILLE PAGLIA, Sexual Personae
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.
H.L. MENCKEN, "Minority Report," Notebooks
If pregnancy were a book they would cut the last two chapters.
NORA EPHRON, Julia Gilden's Woman to Woman
There has never been a time in history when simply being pregnant and giving birth has seemed so complicated. This is because there has never been a time in history when being a woman has seemed so complicated. Whatever gains we imagine we have made in work, in relationships and in the wider culture, the struggle to find a positive definition of what it is to be a woman, particularly in regard to our reproductive lives, is as intense as ever. Nowhere is that struggle felt as keenly as in the arena of pregnancy and birth.
PAT THOMAS, Alternative Therapies for Pregnancy and Birth
Whether your pregnancy was meticulously planned, medically coaxed, or happened by surprise, one thing is certain -- your life will never be the same.
CATHERINE JONES, Eating for Pregnancy
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