Q & A: Is There a Connection Between Childbirth and Orgasm?
Experiences vary, to put it mildly
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Q: I am a Midwife in the final stages of my training for my Certified Professional Midwife (CPM) credential. I also teach childbirth education and support families birthing in hospitals or birth centers. When reading your books I have been struck by the similarities between your discussion of the arousal process and the birthing process.
The mechanisms that govern birth are known to be the exact same ones that govern the sexual arousal mechanism in women (makes perfect sense…). I am writing to you out of curiosity about whether or not this connection has been identified formally by anyone that you are aware of. I would like to know specifically if there is research that has been done to understand this connection and its implications for increasing support for women during the childbirth experience.
A: I approach this kind of question with caution, because there has indeed been conversation about childbirth’s relationship to sexual arousal and even ecstacy or orgasm, but let’s make sure we say out loud, right at the start, that birth experiences vary tremendously and many people’s birth experiences are not remotely ecstatic. The last thing a pregnant person needs is any kind of aspirational ideal that gives them an opportunity to feel like they’ve fallen short.
Okay. That said, Orgasmic Birth is Elizabeth Davis’s book about the possibility of pleasure in the context of welcoming the physiological process of childbirth itself, which, as you say, it’s highly similar to the physiological process of sexual arousal. It involves a lot of the same hormones and anatomy, not to mention a process of increasing physiological arousal crescendoing to waves of contraction and pulsing. On the surface, there’s a lot linking the two.
And the emerging science is increasingly certain that the way we experience a sensation is influenced by the story we tell ourselves about it. Many of us tell ourselves the story that orgasm is a “peak of pleasure” and many of us tell ourselves the story that birth is the worst pain a human body may experience. That expectancy influences how we experience the sensation. So orgasmic birth isn’t so much about orgasm with birth but about the possibility that we don’t have to be afraid of the body’s natural physiological process.
The book itself and the author (plus the related documentary) are completely clear that “orgasmic birth does not necessarily mean you experience orgasm but that you birth connected to your body and your baby with feelings of ecstasy and release, as supported by normal physiology. When this doesn’t happen, it is usually due to environmental factors and/or interventions that disrupt the process. Orgasmic birth is not a performance standard, but it is every woman’s birthright!” (emphasis mine)
And yet it’s difficult to hear the phrase “orgasmic birth” and not worry that it’s setting some kind of aspirational ideal against which to judge or measure a birth.
I’m a sex educator, not a childbirth educator, midwife, or doula, so the whole birth thing is really outside my wheelhouse. As a sex educator, though, I know that orgasm education can feel alienating to people for whom orgasm is a struggle and pleasure-oriented sex education in general can be counter-productive among people for whom sexual arousal has been weaponized.
Childbirth can be the most joyful and, yes, ecstatic moment of someone’s life. It can. And, just as not all sex is ecstatically pleasurable and a pinnacle of a person’s life experience, childbirth is not always pleasurable or amazing or ecstatic. Sometimes it is traumatic.
I have a friend who had a terribly painful birth, where nothing went to plan. She said something about “spine to spine,” which, if you know what that means, you’ll know it’s agony. With her new baby skin-to-skin on her belly, my friend turned to her partner and said, “That was awful.”
She had wanted her baby so much and fell in love with her tiny new human very soon, but the birth was traumatic. And the last thing I would want is for her to feel like her birth was “less than” because it wasn’t joyful and entirely under her control.
I love that the childbirth community is willing to talk about the possibility for pleasure, including erotic pleasure, in the context of the physiological responses of birth. And as a sex educator I know that the most powerful thing educators can do for students is to normalize the wide range of potential experiences, focusing on nonjudgmental attention to whatever is happening in the present moment and empowerment for a person to advocate for their own needs, whatever they may be.
So yes, childbirth and orgasm are related—more than just their superficial overlap in hardware and chemistry. They are related insofar as our cultural narratives about them shape how we feel about our own experiences and can even shape the experience themselves.
I hope that’s helpful!
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