The pain and pleasure of childbirth

Everyone has an opinion on pregnancy and giving birth. The most recent one? Labour should be an orgasmic experience

To see the words "birth" and "orgasmic" in the same sentence reminds many of those old school tests on antonyms. As in: "Which two words don't go together?" But a documentary airing on US television on January 2 challenges that assumption. Debra Pascali-Bonaro's film Orgasmic Birth opines that "women can experience birth as sensual and pleasurable, and can enter a natural state of ecstasy. New research shows that the intimate experience of birth affects a woman's life profoundly."

The idea of orgasmic birth – meaning, apparently, a labour and delivery that ranges from a joyful experience to an actual orgasm felt at the moment of delivery – has been picked up and debated over the last week by the New York Times' Lisa Belkin, Salon and the San Francisco Gate. The movie has been garnering a huge amount of controversy, even before the general public has seen it. Two groups of women are ganging up on each other in a cyber war over the right to experience birth in a joyful way versus the screaming and hair-pulling, 90% medicated mess we normally associate with the event, and everything in between.

Is there a right answer? Perhaps it doesn't matter. But the real issue is that women are constantly being told how best to give birth to their children. Somehow we miss the real idea behind the motivation of films like Pascali-Bonaro's, which aim to take the fear out of what most women's bodies should do naturally. Instead, we see judgment. In so structuring the conversation on this most essential of life events, we're doing everyone a disservice.

For such an atomised society, we've got one thing left that we feel publicly proprietal about: pregnancy and labour. "I admit I'm shocked if I see a pregnant woman light a cigarette," a friend said to me the other day. And I agreed – there's something unseemly about it. For some it's alcohol. "We have a full wine and beer menu," the waitress at Le Pain Quotidian said to me and my dining companion. "But not for you," she said, turning to me. Thanks, lovely, did you think I hadn't heard the risks of alcohol during pregnancy? And actually, a glass of wine or two isn't necessarily so bad. But no matter. The proprietor of a Japanese restaurant came up to me the other day as I was dining to make sure I wasn't eating sushi. "You can't eat that!" she screamed shrilly, looking down at the plate in the middle of the table. I wasn't, I protested, indicating my vegetarian entrée. But still, I found it bizarre. Whose body is this anyway?

But for all the unsolicited advice, there's also an unprecedented level of camaraderie among women who've been pregnant or are in the process of going through it. Sometimes it's amusing, like the checkout woman at Target telling me about her birth. And sometimes it's not at all so. A woman cornered me the other day to tell me about how badly she tore during labour, and how much she screamed. Ah.

Yet that camaraderie dissolves when women are told something they might not like to hear. And for some reason, orgasm and joy appears to be one of those things. "I know the filmmakers felt this was going to be encouraging for women, but I think this just sets another expectation for the whole birth experience," wrote one woman, responding to a story on "For me, all I wanted was a healthy baby and for me to be healthy. Then I was told that if I didn't have a 'fulfilling birth experience' then I really missed out. Now I am supposed to orgasm too?"

How does it work? As one of the commentators in the movie explains: "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. And labour 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." Women in the film experience everything from a full-blown orgasm to simple pleasure. The director says all of it comes from environment. Now that we're in hospitals, for the most part, and now that we're totally medicated, for the most part, we've lost the ability to find joy in this process.

That makes sense to me (maybe not the extreme pleasure, but the loss of comfort). But comments on the New York Times website ranged from enraged and incredulous to those women who sheepishly said they had, yes, experienced orgasm while giving birth. Yet the most salient may have come from a writer named Rebecca. "I'm sorry that ABC doesn't air a show that simply talks about the beauty and benefits of un-medicated/non-surgical childbirth," Rebecca wrote. "To use an extremely rare event such as an orgasm during childbirth to advocate for natural birth seems sensationalistic and will only repel some who might otherwise be swayed by a rational scientific/cultural argument."