One year ago, we posted an article to this blog titled, “There is a secret in our culture, but it is not that women are strong. Why some birth quotes may be damaging to women.” We focused specifically on a birth quote by an author named Laura Stavoe, whose quote appears on birth, midwifery and doula websites all around the world. This blogpost of ours has become our most-commented article of all time, & shared across cyberspace. As a result, it was published in Pathways magazine’s Winter issue under the title, “Encouraging Words, Unintentional Wounds”. We received some heartfelt emails from Pathways readers, & much positive feedback for the article.
We also recently received another email in response to the article in Pathways…from Laura Stavoe herself. She was copying us on an email she had written to the editors of Pathways magazine in response to our article, and wrote to us that she thought that our organisation ‘sounds wonderful, and I truly appreciate all the work you do.’ She thought we’d be interested to know the original context of her quote, which of course we were! We had tried to find this information initially, but because we were searching under Ms Stavoe’s married name, we had no luck. In the end we had decided that, although we really wanted the context, as we guessed it would give more weight to what we were saying, we could still write the article anyway, as it was really about how it can be interpreted that we were concerned with.
As it turns out, the quote is excerpted from an article that is no longer available online, so we were happy and grateful to receive Ms Stavoe’s email. We have reproduced it in full, below :
