Labor of Love
Is orgasmic birth a labor of love? This Friday 20/20 will show a piece on women who experience what ABC News has called labor orgasms. From the looks of the comments over at ABC News, some people are pissed, and not in the I-drank-too-much-for-breakfast sort of way. There were only eight comments when I last checked, but the loudest ones shouted that this was the biggest LIE (their caps not mine) ever told and that only white women into the idea of natural birthing claim to feel any sort of bliss during birth, and that it seems to only be a white thing, which either makes it elitist or non-existent I suppose. (If you look at the "Orgasmic Birth" trailer, or the pictures accompanying this article you realize that this women is either so angry she can’t see photos or actually blind, because it’s not only white women at all).
This notion of birth being natural, but not like a natural disaster, like a natural happy thing to go through is not how we see it in this country. Blissed-out births do seem to happen only to women who allow themselves to get away from the notions of fear and pain around the delivery. They do happen to women who aren’t afraid to let it happen, who have the time to work on themselves before the time arrives when they can’t. And that is only a small portion of women. So how do we spread the idea that every women deserves a happy childbirth (as long as everyone is healthy and can be happy), before she has to spread her legs, breathe and push.
The trailer and the article both make important points about our health care system and how medical hospitals are not usually looking at birth as an experience that women (and their partners) go through, they’re looking at it more like surgery. From how she lies (on her back verses sitting up) to being pushed in a wheelchair through the hospital, the experience is handled in a way that leaves women feeling sick and helpless. Instead, if she can feel empowered and in charge, things can be different. Especially since, from a scientific perspective, it is naturally possible. According to the article, and Dr. Christiane Northrup:
“When the baby’s coming down the birth canal, remember, it’s going through the exact same positions as something going in, the penis going into the vagina, to cause an orgasm,” Northrup said. “And labor itself is associated with a huge hormonal change in the body, way more prolactin, way more oxytocin, way more beta-endorphins — these are the molecules of ecstasy.”
Midwives even massage womens’ vulvas during labor. Imagine if, on top of this midwife massage - which does help prevent tearing when the baby peeks through - your partner was there too, kissing and pinching and rubbing you in all the right places. How good could that feel? Ecstatic? Maybe even orgasmic?
In sex, in labor, in life, there’s that fine line between pleasure and pain. Even just the concept of orgasmic birth, or ecstatic birth, makes me understand so much more about my body and how natural processes like labor don’t have to be about suffering and pain but can be about happiness and excitement. How we each have this switch, think like a light switch, and it’s somewhere in who we are (we have to go in and seek it out) and if we can find it and flick it, and then we can find ways to replace the pain with pleasure. So much of it stems from us having to believe. After reading this article and seeing the "Orgasmic Birth" trailer, I do believe. I believe there’s something really beautiful, powerful and exciting about being unafraid to give birth. If I ever got the opportunity to try it firsthand (and yes, I’d like the opportunity), then I’m reaching for ecstasy. The kind you can’t find in a little white pill.
Read the full story at ABC News.
More on Orgasmic Birth.
This article was originally posted on Jamye's blog.
Image: "pregnant profile II" by mahalie on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.
Tweet- 12-12-08
- Jamye Waxman's blog
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Comments
This is beautiful!
This is beautiful!
Thank you for posting this. I have never had children, but know that when that time comes, I will explore that experience to it's highest possible potential - orgasmic birth. What can be more ecstatic?!
Nassim Haramein and his wife are featured in this story!
This is wild. Nassim Haramein of the Resonance Project Foundation, whom many RSers are familiar with, is interviewed along with his wife, Amber Hartnell, in this 20/20 story.
From the ABCNews site:
"Amber Hartnell of Hawaii said she experienced an orgasm during labor when she gave birth to her son in September 2005.
"All of a sudden the orgasm just started rolling through and rolling through, and it just kept coming, and my whole body was spiraling and rolling, and I was laughing and crying," she said.
Hard to imagine? Hartnell and her husband, Nassim Haramein, were shocked as well. Although they had spent many hours planning for their son's birth, in a tub under a tree outside their home, they say they never planned for an "orgasmic" birth.
Haramein was amazed -- and also relieved -- to see his wife experience such pleasure..."
-st
So weird. We were just
Absolutely!
There is nothing more natural than birth. Why do we feel the need to put women in hospitals, give them pain-killers, and treat them like they have an affliction? I am very surprised that ABC news featured something like this, and it is about time! What a way to wake people up! Guess what? Birth can not only be done without pain killers, but it can be pleasurable, too! I love it!
-Amy
“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention” ~Oscar Wilde
Natural incentives
Thank you for this article! Excellent!
Actually, this seems to make a lot of sense. That the sexual act is pleasurable no questions. Yet there are some definite exceptions in women who experience pain with sex but pleasure with birth.
We are supposed to believe that the pleasure of sex or some expectation of joy in the child overcomes the knowledge of pains of delivery.
That this 'extrusion' might also stimulate an 'orgasm' seems perfectly natural; while that that should be deemed some kind of 'shame' or 'wickedness' in the mother seems a perfectly natural opinion of the utterly unnatural mind-set that deems 'birth' as a 'medical' issue or a matter that has only recently been reduced to a 'science' and a purely practical matter of hospitalism.
However, I'm sure that the practical nurses of ages past have known about this, but our puritanical attitudes have not allowed this oral tradition to be set forth in the print of the 'scientists' who have made themselves accoucher 'policemen'. (Read Dickens)
I would think that any mother NOT having an orgasm at giving birth is experiencing a kind of dysfunction or undergoing some extreme form of self-repression probably due to mores imposed by a very highly intellectual and abstract simplicity . . . read STUPIDITY.
Yes, naturally, the delight of children can overcome such disfunction, but the NORMAL state probably would be that with every birth: there is an orgasm. I might even speculate that such orgasm has no comparison to the original sexual act. Probably many times greater.
One day, I'm sure, we'll have a specific branch of gynecological pyschology that explores why some women DON'T experience such orgasm, since that pleasure makes sense in an evolutionary sense.
And these 'psychologists/physionomists will use that admitted 'disfunction' for exploring all possible avenues of personal history and physiognomy and they'll make a buck while they're doing it. And the mostly stupid will pay that buck.
I can hardly believe that this is even a matter of any note, at all.
But I'm so glad that this article was written. I'm adding it to my library of 'natural science' and, as well, to my library of the stupidity of medicine and modern culture.
======================
Art is the pinnacle of science.
trying not to...
The following statement is quite offensive:
Rogerscott, you posted this:
"I would think that any mother NOT having an orgasm at giving birth is experiencing a kind of dysfunction or undergoing some extreme form of self-repression probably due to mores imposed by a very highly intellectual and abstract simplicity . . . read STUPIDITY."
I used natural childbirth when I gave birth to my son. I did not have an orgasm when I gave birth, nor do I regret not having one. My (and his birth) experience was very empowering and wonderful and I would not have done anything differently. He was a posterior birth, and partly because of that he was stuck in my birth canal for 4 hours. Since I declined to have an epidural or any medical intervention, he eventually "popped" out. They wanted to use forceps, I would not allow it. But the pushing faze of my birth was like running two marathons back to back. Sure, it was painful, although my own endorphins kicked in so I was essentially "high." It was a intense and incredible experience, and because of the position of my son during the birth, it was also not easy. And no matter how open minded and un-self repressed I may be, an orgasm for me would not have been possible in that situation.
It is wonderful that women can achieve orgasm at birth, but just because some women do not is no reason to call their experience "stupid." Birth is very personal and unpredictable. Orgasms are great, but definitely not the point for me, neither in sex nor birth. Intimacy, love, empowerment, and grace are much more of the essence.
-Amy
“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention” ~Oscar Wilde
Friday Jan 2nd
I am not sure if this was bumped last minute, or overlooked, but it did not run on Friday -- ABC says it will air January 2nd.
-st
Connecting with Gaia
I find this work, along with other sexually transformative modalities like tantra, might help us in industrialized nations to start to reconnect with our bodies, finding renewed pleasure in our senses, helping us to better connect with the Gaian force supporting us all.
It seems that the Garden of Eden story, which takes place in the Fertile Crescent and the birthplace of the agricultural/technological revolution and Western Civilization, is very much about guilt, shame and pain around sexuality, especially now that the woman is cursed with labor pains from this new acquisition of knowledge (good and evil in the apple). What if we could take that further where women are actually orgasming during birth, bringing them in even closer connection with the divine creative force of the universe? It might help us to lose some fear of nature and take better care of our own mother, planet Earth.
yay =]
I love u sms
Criminals that scratch off