Birth is Sexual - 5 Reasons Why
For over 20 years I’ve been telling everyone I meet that we have to shift the way we look at birth. Instead of it as something to endure, it should be something we actively participate in, with power, confidence, and love.
Birth is a part of our sexual lives. When you separate birth from sexuality, it impacts the experience you have giving birth and can have a profound impact on your sexuality in the short and long term. To explore this even deeper, it’s important to note that for survivors, birth can be a time of retraumatization or healing, depending on the care that the birthing person experiences.
Yet our medical views of birth often strip away or sterilize birth of the power, pleasure, and yes sexuality of childbirth. Take time to consider why I believe considering the sexuality of childbirth is important and after hearing my top 5 reasons I would love to hear yours @OrgasmicBirth
Let’s explore the top 5 Reasons Why Birth is Sexual:
1. The Anatomy of Birth (is Sexual)
The anatomy of birth is the anatomy of pleasure, intimacy, and sacred sexuality. Birth moves a baby through a cervix, vagina, opens the labia, and touches clitoral nerves – all that under the right conditions can also bring pleasure and orgasm. I always say if you were to tell a person with a penis that they would have sensations there for over 10 hours, but that it isn’t sexual, that they would look at you like they were crazy!
2. Birth requires the same elements as Sex
Giving birth the same safety, privacy and altered state of consciousness as great sex require. The feelings that create lubrication, safety, and openness to sexuality can help open the birthing person to birth – while the opposite is true too. Vagina owners know when the conditions are not right, when they don’t feel safe, the vagina closes, but with the right safety and love, the vagina expands.
3. Our Hormones
The hormones of childbirth are similar to the hormones released in sex and orgasm and require the same environment and conditions to flow easily. Yes, giving birth is orchestrated by a set of hormones which when provided with the optimal environment help birth to be safe and efficient. Orgasm requires a similar set of hormones to flow, and during birth or sex, the interruption of these hormones can stall birth or prevent orgasm.
4. The sounds of Birth (and Sex)
I love to play birth video sounds for people and ask them if the person is giving birth or having sex. Those primal sounds are so very similar, and the vocalization is a primal desire to release and open. When giving birth if you have safety and privacy the sounds are released without any thought, as the body opens.
5. Overthinking it
When having sex, you’ll probably know, that once your brain wanders and you “try” to force an orgasm, it does the opposite. Just like really feeling sex, you can’t think your way through birth. Spending too much time in your thinking brain can impede both giving birth and orgasm.
What feelings came up for you when reading my 5 reasons that birth is sexual? Where do they come from? There is a great deal of shame and much to unpack about sexuality and motherhood/parenthood. I look forward to hearing your thoughts about how our overuse of medically managing birth and underuse of pleasure impacts the way people prepare for and give birth?
What will you do to reclaim pleasure, love, and connection in childbirth?
Our acclaimed programs transform pain and fear into power and pleasure
© Gwen Schroeder |Rebirth Photography
© Monet Nicole