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Can You Really Have an Orgasmic Birth?
Some women are actively pursuing pleasure in labor
When Chelsea Bray found out she was pregnant with her second child, she knew she wanted her next birth experience to be different. While she describes her first birth two and a half years prior — an unmedicated hospital birth — as “wonderful, by all accounts,” she went home feeling generally dissatisfied by her hospital experience. Rather than a baby-focused approach, she wanted more continuity of care for her as a whole person, not just a vessel for the baby.
Her second birth — a home birth with a midwife — was different: She thought that the process was considerably shorter and more comfortable than her previous one. But, to Bray’s surprise, her second birth wasn’t just pain-free, sans medication. It was actually pleasurable — orgasmic, even. When the baby’s head lowered into her birth canal, Bray says she experienced an overpowering, whole-body physical sensation she compares to an orgasm: “I just remember roaring a sound I didn’t know I had the capacity to make.”
Bray says her birth experience switched from merely tolerable to pleasurable when she decided not to be afraid during the intense, physical sensations. “From that point on, it was a trip, literally — I felt high. It was like a full-body explosion of feeling,” Bray says. “The things about birth you’re told to fear were not painful for me. They were the climax, so to speak.”
Birth may not seem sexy, but some researchers say the experience of delivering a baby is deeply intertwined with a woman’s sexuality — and that embracing it as such can not only decrease pain in labor but cause actual, sexual pleasure. Some women claim their birth is “orgasmic” in the same way that a good piece of dark chocolate might bring heightened sensory awareness, while others say they have literal “birthgasms” due to the baby’s convenient positioning in the vagina.
“It’s quite obvious that birth is part of our sexuality — it’s how we created the baby, and it also involves the sexual parts of our bodies,” says Sarah Buckley, an Australian physician and hormone researcher. “Birth is intrinsically a passionate experience, but what’s happened is that in order to medically administer birth, we’ve had to desexualize it.”
