What's It Actually Like to Have an Orgasmic Birth?

What you should know about this misunderstood phenomenon.
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Debra Pascali-Bonaro's orgasmic birth happened when she was in labor with her third child. Pascali-Bonaro, who has been a doula and childbirth educator for 30 years, had always believed that childbirth could be a joyful, blissful process and a part of a woman’s sexuality. Despite her years of experience assisting other births, it was not until her own third labor that she was able to experience orgasmic birth for herself. She says that giving birth in a positive birth center environment with supportive attendants and a trusted midwife was key to the orgasmic sensations. "I felt supported, loved, and uninhibited to do what I wanted," she tells Glamour. "I moved, stood, swayed, listened to music, took a shower, and enjoyed each last surge of ecstatic orgasmic release as my baby slid from my body into my arms."

Orgasmic birth—a phenomenon of labor and delivery being pleasurable, also called ecstatic birth—is a controversial topic. One study estimates about 0.3 percent of women experience one. Some women may orgasm spontaneously during the process, while others may opt to masturbate or even have intercourse during labor. Masturbating or having sex, of course, is difficult for women birthing in a hospital setting, where there is little privacy and laboring women may be hooked up to IVs and fetal monitors. Given that around 98 percent of women in the U.S. give birth in a hospital, the very idea of orgasmic birth is totally foreign to most pregnant women.

So Pascali-Bonaro directed a 2009 documentary, Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret, to dispel myths about orgasmic birth and share information about it. She says the births she attended as a doula convinced her that orgasmic birth was something more women should hear about. In her work she noticed that women could experience all kinds of enjoyment during labor, even if it wasn't an out-and-out orgasm in the traditional sense. “I was at births and seeing people have great pleasure,” she says. “There was joy, there was ecstasy, there was bliss, there was relief. There was a huge gap in our vocabulary about birth. People are comfortable talking about pain, but not about the transformation and the positive aspects.”

Angela Gallo, a birth photographer and doula, chose to masturbate while giving birth to her second child at home. In a February 2016 blog post about her experience, she explained that the idea came to her when labor became overwhelming.

“Clitoral stimulation worked an absolute treat,” Gallo wrote. “It shifted my focus to my vagina, to the energy brewing within me. It made me feel connected, and made me feel like I had some control over what I was feeling. The surges were much more manageable, and the rest between them was so much more enjoyable.”

She says that having an orgasm helped her manage pain: “If I close my eyes now, I am taken back to that place. The hot water on my back, my husband’s hands locked in mine, the safety of his presence, the happiness as I rode those wild waves. Orgasmic in a sexual way—no. Pleasure—yes. It was my glorious instinctual pain-relief system coming to life!”

In her blog post Gallo wrote that she was proud of herself for exploring something so taboo. Pascali-Bonaro agrees that orgasmic birth is rarely talked about and as such is entirely misunderstood. “I’ve received [many] emails from women who have had a birth-gasm,” she says. “They never told their partner, they never told their best friend, they certainly didn't tell their doctor.” Pascali-Bonaro says that women who experience a spontaneous orgasm during childbirth are often alarmed. But as Christiane Northrup M.D., an ob-gyn who helped narrate Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret, explains, childbirth and orgasms are actually physiologically similar. “All of the pathways that are involved in sexual pleasure are in fact stimulated by birthing a baby,” she says in the documentary. “And when you can allow yourself to open in the same way that you open to orgasm, the exact same experience is possible.”

Experts agree that women may be reticent to share their orgasmic-birth stories. Anthropologist Anna Caffrey interviewed seven women about their pleasurable and often orgasmic-birth experiences for her 2014 paper "Experiences of Pleasurable Childbirth: Uncovering a Blind Spot in Anthropology." Caffrey concluded that while her subjects’ pleasurable birth experiences “ranged from physical pleasure to feelings of ecstasy, to deeply spiritual,” none of the women she spoke to was comfortable talking about this aspect of their births. Some data on the prevalence of orgasmic birth is available, but experts believe the phenomenon is likely underreported. Psychologist Thierry Postel surveyed 956 French midwives for his study “Childbirth Climax: The Revealing of Obstetrical Orgasm,” published in Sexologies in 2013. He received 109 complete responses from midwives who had, combined, assisted 206,000 births during their careers. The midwives reported 668 cases in which mothers said they had “felt orgasmic sensations in birth.” Furthermore, nine mothers confirmed to Postel that they had orgasmed during labor.

Many women on the Internet have shared their stories anonymously or using pseudonyms, stressing to skeptics that, yes, this phenomenon really exists.

“I had an orgasm in labor,” one woman shared on Reddit. “It wasn't via masturbation. It just happened. But it was not a sensual wave of relaxed delight. It was the brief intensity of the physical orgasm, plus the intensity of pain. Like being mid-gasm and breaking your toe.”

Another blogger wrote that, as her baby crowned, she “suddenly felt an explosion of absolute euphoria, the feeling exploded.” A woman interviewed for the Evening Standard explained: “I was alone with my partner at home, and despite feeling some pain, I also felt these waves of ecstatic pleasure passing through me. Once I let go of all my preconceived assumptions and just listened to my body, I felt these overwhelming blissful sensations, which eventually led to an orgasmic peak just as the baby came out. It was sensational.”

Pascali-Bonaro stresses that having an orgasm during birth is not something she would ever encourage women to try and plan for or use as a labor performance standard. Instead, she encourages pregnant women to think about what would make childbirth more comfortable, enjoyable, and blissful for them—birth-gasms or no.