Quotes / Death by Childbirth

She lost the will to live? What's your degree in - poetry?

—Dr. Ball, Robot Chicken, about Padme Amidala in Revenge of the Sith

Tauza: You are the product of a Scarran male, and a Sebacean female. The mating process shattered her fragile psyche: during the gestation she pleaded for death.

Scorpius: (Hoarsely) You killed her!

Tauza: Your birth was... difficult. You killed her.

—Farscape, "Incubator"

Men say that women's lives are without danger
They stay at home while their husbands go to war
False! I'd rather stand ten times behind the shield-wall
In battle than but once carry a child.

—Medea

Elizabeth: So, Mr. DeWitt, is there a woman in your life?
Booker: There was. She died.
Elizabeth: How?
Booker: Giving birth.
Elizabeth: Oh... You have a child?
Booker: No.

— Bioshock Infinite

"She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more—to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself."

—Northanger Abbey

A woman's war is in the birthing bed.

—Randyll Tarly, A Song of Ice and Fire

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail;
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions—not in these her honour dwells—
She is the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

—Rudyard Kipling, The Female of the Species

How their father had managed to manufacture them, he had never been certain. He had reportedly given their mother a shot of something, with her concession, that would produce magnificent physical specimens in their offspring. Mom had agreed to it. After all, who doesn't want beautiful children? But Magnificus's birth had taxed her, and she never quite recovered from bearing Beautia. Within two months of the girl's birth, their mother was dead.

— Here There Be Monsters

Time wore on at the Grange in its former pleasant way, till Miss Cathy reached sixteen. On the anniversary of her birth we never manifested any signs of rejoicing, because it was also the anniversary of my late mistress's death.

— Wuthering Heights

Eloise: Dad… I'm sorry.
Dad: What for?
Eloise: If I wasn't born, Mom would've been—
Dad: If there's ever one thing that warrants an apology, it's not that. It's never that, honey.
Eloise: …Okay.

— Morsel page #11

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