Maternal Trauma Quotes

The horrors of war, pale beside the loss of a mother

Abortion kills twice. It kills the body of the baby and it kills the conscience of the mother. Abortion is profoundly anti-women. Three quarters of its victims are women: Half the babies and all the mothers.

My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did.

I always tell people, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she'd have to kill either herself or her mother, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.

I did a book signing when we were in New York the day before yesterday. A lady came through and she was just weeping, and said, 'I wish this would have been brought out sooner, my sister is in prison for suffocating her child.'

You don't know anything about pain until you've seen your own baby drowned in a tub... and you definitely don't know anything about how to wash a baby.

Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.