This sweeping maternity documentary takes the viewers through the birth experiences of nine women. In seven poignant home birth stories, the women express the transformational quality of their births and the importance of their partner’s intimate support. While two of the women give birth in the hospital, only one has the customary American hospital labor experience. The second spends much of her labor in her own home and is transported by ambulance to deliver in the hospital. The director artfully includes the longer hospital birth story amongst the many home births with a startling contrast.
Produced and directed by Debra Pascali-Bonaro, Orgasmic Birth is an exciting presentation of the power of intimate birth. She explores the sensual, sexual side of birth with not only personal accounts, but also the expert opinions of medical and maternity care professionals such as Marsden Wagner, MD, Sarah Buckly MD, Christiane Northrup MD, and Elizabeth Davis, CPM. At the crux of the collected wisdom of the maternity professionals lies the premise of the movie title: childbirth in both a hormonal and neurological sense is a very sexual, sensual experience, intended, biologically, to be experienced in intimate and emotionally safe environments.
“Ecstatic birth is mother nature’s hormonal blueprint for ALL women, it’s not just something some women can experience. Every woman, during the process of labor and birth produces peak levels of birthing hormones. What we are just beginning to understand is how important the circumstances of childbirth are for the whole hormonal orchestration. Many of the interventions that are commonly used in maternity care today will reduce the release of these hormones in the laboring woman’s body and make her birth less ecstatic, less pleasurable and actually less safe for her and her baby.” Sarah Buckley, obstetrician.
Some of the women enter their labors with confidence and ease with their laboring bodies, while others bring to their birth fears and past traumatic experiences. What Pascali-Bonaro captures beautifully is how a labor, allowed to unfold unfettered by external timetables or rules and with intimate support, allows a woman to move through her own emotional and spiritual journey to a climatic conclusion. The end result: transformation. Marsden Wagner says it simply when he states that a woman should feel in labor, “safe, secure and uninterrupted.” Christiane Northrup takes it further in saying, “If your providers knew that their job was to create a safe container for you to experience everything that was possible and they encouraged you to do this, you would relax, your body would open. It would be totally different.”
Many childbirth documentaries have been made over the years in an attempt to change the unhealthy culture of birth that exists in America. This movie makes a bold and dramatic statement by exploring the sensual, sexual nature of birth. Those of us who have experienced an ecstatic birth, know how indescribable birth can be when in an intimate environment. With caregivers that you trust, a partner to kiss, laugh, and caress you, and a belief in your body, birth occurs as nature intended.
“The best kept secret about childbirth, as far as I’m concerned, is that it IS a sexual experience. I mean all we have to do is look at the hormones at play in the process. Not only do we have the endorphins, we have oxytocin - that we otherwise know as the love hormone.” (Elizabeth Davis, CPM).
If you have not had a chance to see this movie, I highly recommend finding a copy to view. This movie takes the viewer into a new paradigm of childbirth - supported not only by science, but also intimate experiences of real laboring women. To find an Orgasmic Birth screening near you check out www.orgasmicbirth.com, or check out our calendar here for a possible screeing date at a location near you. Many screenings include a discussion after the movie.
-Submitted by Sheryl
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.