Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret

Welcome to Orgasmic Birth, the film creating buzz around the world!

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Orgasmic Birth

Orgasmic Birth

THE AWARD WINNING FILM AVAILABLE IN SEVEN LANGUAGES

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Although a small percentage of births benefit from the use of technology and surgery, the overuse of technology in hospital births today often causes more harm than good. 

The U.S. cesarean section rate for 2019 was 31.7%, well above what researchers consider safe and appropriate use (WHO recommends between 10-15%). 

According to Maureen Corry, Executive Director of Childbirth Connection, New York City:  

“Results of the U.S. Listening to Mothers Survey demonstrate that technology-intensive birth is the norm, with a majority of women reporting each of the following interventions while giving birth: electronic fetal monitoring, intravenous drip, artificially ruptured membranes, artificial oxytocin to strengthen contractions, and epidural analgesia.”

Women today, trusting that all offered techniques and procedures are safe, eagerly accept epidural analgesia for pain relief and artificial oxytocin to induce or augment labor. 

However, these drugs and procedures have many negative short-term and long-term effects on mother and baby that should be considered and questioned. 

With almost one in three American women having a surgical birth, our experts look at the current data and discuss the risks that overuse of cesarean section is causing to mothers and babies.

Orgasmic Birth was created to tell a different story…

One where women tune into themselves and trust their body’s natural ability to do what is needed to bring their baby into the world safely.

Joyous, sensuous and revolutionary, Orgasmic Birth brings the ultimate challenge to our cultural myths by inviting viewers to see the emotional, spiritual, and physical heights attainable through birth.

 

In this 85-minute award-winning film, you will:
  • Learn about the risks and dangers of the overuse of medical/cesarean births
  • Discover the benefits of a safe, sexy, orgasmic birth
  • Follow the stories of real couples as they experience giving birth naturally

It's more than a film, it's a movement.

“I believe this is the most well-balanced, truthful, celebration of birth that I have ever viewed.”
Carolyn Rafferty, RNC-O

Watch Orgasmic Birth now and discover how love and intimacy create pleasure when most only feel pain.

Rent or Buy Today

Award-Winning Film is Available in Seven Languages

“Less a story about orgasms and sex than a story of love and the power of birth!”
Sarah Akers, CNM

What IS Orgasmic Birth?

Orgasmic Birth can be the blissful waves in between contractions. One can enter this altered state and ride the waves of sensation, expanding into pleasure and increasing sexual energy and the hormones consuming one’s being. 

Riding the wave creates a peaceful, total body sensation that lingers as energy is exchanged between you, your baby, and your partner. Birthing in love is a state of filling your entire body and being with oxytocin, the love hormone, and surrendering to the power within. 

Dr. Sarah Buckley writes in Ecstatic Birth: The Hormonal Blueprint of Labor,
“Such high levels (of beta-endorphins) help the laboring woman to transmute pain and enter the altered state of consciousness that characterizes an undisturbed birth.”

I believe in and trust that the body that grows a baby knows how to birth the baby. 

I believe it is every woman’s human right to have a pleasurable birth. 

It all comes down to how you define it. I define my orgasmic birth as a heightened sensation – that moment of release and feeling your baby slide from your body into your arms. I think that every birth has that orgasmic element.

Orgasmic Birth is to give birth with and in love, to move through labor with power and to honor the emotional and physical heights that labor holds. Childbirth is an opportunity to experience the extraordinary miracle of bringing new life into the world and Orgasmic Birth provides the conditions to reclaim and honor that miracle. 

Labor and birth takes women to the depth of the unknown, to face their fears, while pushing through the intensity – releasing and riding the waves of our body that with the right conditions and comfort can bring women to the peaks of joy, pleasure, and hormonal ecstasy.

Orgasmic Birth is all these things – the orgasm, the ecstasy, the hormones, and the love – and that is why it is so amazing.

Creating the Film

When I was filming “Orgasmic Birth: The Best Kept Secret” documentary, I witnessed many beautiful, pleasurable, powerful, and orgasmic births.

The original concept for the film WAS to show that birth can be an empowering and pleasurable experience, but what surprised me was when the laboring mamas were able to birth in their power, surrounded by love, support, care and respect, that their births were dramatically more pleasurable too. 

I had witnessed many births as a doula – I knew that this was possible, but the wave of pleasurable and even orgasmic births that took place during my filming process was extraordinary. 

When it was time to name the film, I knew we had to make a bold statement — birth, under the right circumstances, was an ORGASMIC EXPERIENCE!

What IS Orgasmic Birth?

Orgasmic Birth can be the blissful waves in between contractions. One can enter this altered state and ride the waves of sensation, expanding into pleasure and increasing sexual energy and the hormones consuming one’s being. 

Riding the wave creates a peaceful, total body sensation that lingers as energy is exchanged between you, your baby, and your partner. Birthing in love is a state of filling your entire body and being with oxytocin, the love hormone, and surrendering to the power within. 

Dr. Sarah Buckley writes in Ecstatic Birth: The Hormonal Blueprint of Labor,
“Such high levels (of beta-endorphins) help the laboring woman to transmute pain and enter the altered state of consciousness that characterizes an undisturbed birth.”

I believe in and trust that the body that grows a baby knows how to birth the baby. 

I believe it is every woman’s human right to have a pleasurable birth. 

It all comes down to how you define it. I define my orgasmic birth as a heightened sensation – that moment of release and feeling your baby slide from your body into your arms. I think that every birth has that orgasmic element.

Orgasmic Birth is to give birth with and in love, to move through labor with power and to honor the emotional and physical heights that labor holds. Childbirth is an opportunity to experience the extraordinary miracle of bringing new life into the world and Orgasmic Birth provides the conditions to reclaim and honor that miracle. 

Labor and birth takes women to the depth of the unknown, to face their fears, while pushing through the intensity – releasing and riding the waves of our body that with the right conditions and comfort can bring women to the peaks of joy, pleasure, and hormonal ecstasy.

Orgasmic Birth is all these things – the orgasm, the ecstasy, the hormones, and the love – and that is why it is so amazing.

Creating the Film

When I was filming “Orgasmic Birth: The Best Kept Secret” documentary, I witnessed many beautiful, pleasurable, powerful, and orgasmic births.

The original concept for the film WAS to show that birth can be an empowering and pleasurable experience, but what surprised me was when the laboring mamas were able to birth in their power, surrounded by love, support, care and respect, that their births were dramatically more pleasurable too. 

I had witnessed many births as a doula – I knew that this was possible, but the wave of pleasurable and even orgasmic births that took place during my filming process was extraordinary. 

When it was time to name the film, I knew we had to make a bold statement — birth, under the right circumstances, was an ORGASMIC EXPERIENCE!

Reclaim your body and create the birth you desire for you and your baby!

Rent or Buy Today

Award-Winning Film is Available in Seven Languages

Meet The Experts

Nine percent of American women who give birth experience post-traumatic stress disorder after labor and birth. 

Nearly one in five women and, by extension, their families experience the long-term effects of postpartum depression.

In order to better understand the science and unearth the evidence that there is a better way than the system that’s been created for us, we met with five of the world’s leading experts in childbirth.

Here’s a glimpse of what they had to say…

Marsden Wagner

Marsden Wagner, MD, former Director of Women’s and Children’s Health for the World Health Organization says in the film:

“Very clear hard evidence in the last 10 years [shows that] the number of women who are induced—that is, their labor is kick-started—is doubling. You kick-start labor by giving them a powerful drug. And then you give them more drugs to keep the labor going. 

Now, there are about five to ten percent of women in which there’s a good medical reason to do this, and you’re saving lives and all that. But if you go above ten percent, you’re not saving lives anymore. These are powerful drugs with all kinds of risks, including brain damage to the baby, a dead baby, a dead woman. And yet we do it twice as much [as we used to]. 

And there’s so much pain in induction—incredible pain. And so they have to come with all the pain relief and the epidurals and all of that. So we get induction, leading to epidural, which leads to cesarean. And that is what’s happening in this country. 

Now, why? Did something happen? Did American women’s bodies suddenly go bad? Did American women’s bodies suddenly lose the ability to figure out when it’s time to go into labor? 

Goodness, no! You know, why do 60 to 80 percent of American women have to have powerful drugs and interventions to their bodies? Well, it has nothing to do with there being anything wrong with their body. And it’s not because of bad doctors. It’s a bad system.”

Orgasmic Birth movie captures intimate home births as well as births with midwives in US hospitals. 

With the decrease in hospital-based midwifery practices in the United States, the option for normal hospital birth is gradually disappearing in many communities. 

We look at other models of midwifery care, such as in New Zealand and the Netherlands — models that have achieved some of the lowest rates of maternal and infant mortality in the world.

Dr. Wagner discusses how a midwifery model of care is cost effective while contributing to a safe and positive birth for mothers, babies, and families:

“More and more countries are losing fewer women and losing fewer babies than the US, including Cuba and Slovenia. Countries that we would normally expect not to have such a great record are losing fewer women and fewer babies than we are. 

And it’s not because we have bad doctors. We have highly trained, very good doctors, as good as anywhere in the world. We have good nurses—as good as any…  

We don’t have enough midwives! We have 40,000 obstetricians and 5,000 midwives. Great Britain has 1,000 obstetricians and 35,000 midwives, and they lose fewer women and babies than we do.”

Pain, endorphins, comfort techniques, water, doulas, epidurals: Orgasmic Birth views women’s options for labor and birth and examines the risks and benefits.

Brazilian obstetrician Ricardo Jones, MD, discusses the process of giving birth and the role of a physician in that process:

“There is a space within our culture for medical interventions. That is why doctors are important in reducing maternal and prenatal mortality. 

At the same time, we have to honor the traditions of millions of women throughout the world and throughout history. Women have the inner power and the inner knowledge of giving birth. There is a parallel of sexuality and giving birth. 

Women who are giving birth, trust yourselves. Trust your inner power. Trust your ability to give life. This is something absolutely sacred that is inside all women in the world. 

A doctor, nurse, and all midwives in the world are people who are not in the position to teach a woman how to give birth, but to make it easier for her to do what she already knows how to do.”

Ina May Gaskin, internationally acclaimed midwife, author and founder and director of the Farm Midwifery Center, believes the reason we’ve turned to over medicalizing childbirth  lies in our past:

“The United States has a peculiar history about childbirth. There is a higher level of fear of birth in this country than we see in so many cultures around the world. I think it has to do with our own peculiar history of absolutely destroying the profession of midwifery in the early twentieth century. 

When you destroy midwives, you also destroy a body of knowledge that is shared by women, that can’t be put together by a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of male obstetricians, because physiologically, birth doesn’t happen the same way around surgeons, medically trained doctors, as it does around sympathetic women.”

Carrie Contey, PhD, a leader in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology, says:

“What we’re finding is that it does matter—it absolutely does matter—how somebody comes into the world. And it doesn’t mean all babies should be born this way or that way. It just means that we have to pay attention and recognize that those babies are having experiences. 

And the way that birth happens when it’s left to happen naturally, without drugs and without forceps, is really what the baby’s body is expecting. There’s a biological readying that’s happening. So it’s incredibly important that we start thinking about this time period in a new way, and we start caring for moms and babies and families around the birth experience in much more thoughtful and mindful ways than we are doing right now.”

It’s every woman’s human right to have a pleasurable birth.

Debra Pascali Bonaro
Founder, Orgasmic Birth

The Woman Behind the Film

I can’t explain exactly why I was always fascinated with birth, but ever since I was a young girl, I loved listening to the birth stories of my grandmother and great-grandmother.

When I was a teen, I volunteered as a candy-striper at a hospital in hopes I could peek inside labor and delivery, and I eventually went to college for nursing solely to be able to practice in labor and delivery.

During my time in nursing school, I quickly became exposed to the medicalization in the field and became so disillusioned that I left college to become a ski instructor, followed by a career as an international flight attendant. I thought this career detour would lead me somewhere else and at first, it did.

I eventually enrolled into McGill University in Montreal. As a means to continue my exploration of the world, and so that I could travel for free, I participated in an educational exchange in Sussex, England with a work/study program teaching skiing to children in Scotland.

Eventually, my journey came full circle.

I graduated from McGill with a Degree in Education, and I was eight weeks pregnant with my first son.

My rekindled passion for birth took form during that pregnancy, and my preparation for the birth finally brought all the stories and passion I had about it into action.

You can hear my birth story inside our programs – so I won’t spoil it here, but I will tell you that I took the time to educate myself when I was pregnant. I knew that I had the power within to give birth the way that I had intended to and I was determined not to let anyone put me down physically or emotionally.

After my son’s birth, I started to reflect upon my experience in birth and began to question why so many people accept our broken system as it was and go along with the assembly line of generic interventions, wanting to trust the process yet feeling inside that something was wrong with it.

I was inspired to provide relief to this issue, and so I became a childbirth educator. My role as a classroom educator evolved, and soon families began to invite me to attend their births.

I quickly learned that I had become a doula, and was part of the beginnings of the doula movement. I became one of the first DONA approved birth and postpartum doula trainers teaching parents, doulas, midwives, doctors and nurses around the world.

I have learned that by taking away the power of birth, and by putting women in beds and hospital gowns, stripping away their ability to move, dance, and find joy in childbirth we have not only made birth more difficult, and more painful, but sadly we are missing out on an amazing opportunity to birth ourselves and our babies with respect, dignity, love, pleasure, and creating a heightened physical and emotional experience – one that I call Orgasmic!

What I have experienced while attending births has been both challenging and yet filled with so much joy.

The media and often medical teams only ever talk about pain which causes fear and perpetuates more pain.

There is love, joy, ecstasy, release, power, bliss and waves of expansion in birth. I hear sounds, movements and expressions that make even partners smile and say, “I recognize that look and that sound” – confirming that birth sounds sexual. 

Midwives around the world have long known that birth is a part of a woman’s sexual life. How can it be that we move a baby through our uterus, cervix, vagina, vulva, open our labia, and the baby hits the G-spot, and we don’t ever talk about how birth is part of our sexuality?

The hormones of birth and sex are the same and require the same conditions – privacy, safety, and feeling of being unobserved to flow.

I’ve supported women using traditional comfort measures and witnessed them bearing their pain and often transforming it into pleasure.

I was fortunate to learn these comfort techniques and traditional tools used for birth from midwives I met attending births around the world in Mexico, US, New Zealand, Netherlands and Bali, and from my mentor, Penny Simkin.

I soon discovered that we had lost many of these traditional practices as well as the ancestral knowledge of how to make birth safer, shorter and more pleasurable.

I knew I had to reframe the language around birth and reintegrate these traditional skills back into the world which eventually led me to create my award-winning documentary, Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret and shortly after, our book Orgasmic Birth.

“I won’t stop until we heal our broken maternity care system and the good news is that we are starting to make and see changes”

I have seen firsthand how current practices in birth often create pain when there are so many simple ways to reduce pain, making natural birth a much more feasible option, which is why the work I do as chair of the International MotherBaby Childbirth Organization and co-chair of the International Childbirth Initiative: 12 Steps to Safe and Respectful MotherBaby-Family Maternity Care is so important to me.

I have a unique ability to work at both the grassroots level with parents, doulas and communities as well as with the grasstops level with Doctors, Nurses, Midwives, Administrators, Ministries of Health and at the United Nations.

Statistics have shown that we have pushed the limits of what technology can do for us, and now we know the many short and long-term consequences for Mother-Baby and Family when we use drugs and surgery when they are not needed.  

It’s my greatest desire to spread this knowledge by making it more accessible, and so now I am available to work with you too!  

I am here to guide you to give birth in any setting or situation with more love, dignity, and respect.  

Join me so that you can Positively Prepare for Birth with Pleasure!

Come and join me and allow me to guide you on this sacred journey. Let’s have fun as I will inspire you to learn how to connect more deeply to your natural ability and to find pleasure in birth and life!

With sincere love and pleasure,

You deserve to have all the information you need to make the best decision for you and your baby.

Equip yourself with the knowledge we share so that you can release the fear and pain to experience your own Orgasmic Birth!

Rent or Buy Today

Award-Winning Film is Available in Seven Languages,

OB in the Media

We Give Back

We donate a percentage of every class to improve care and create birth equality. As Co-Chair of the International Birth Initiative: 12 Steps to Safe, Respectful Mother Baby Family Maternity Care, I work with maternity sites around the world. I know how far support can ripple out as we come together to ensure safe, satisfying, and pleasurable births for all.

Resources:

Mayberry L1, Daniel J2., ‘Birthgasm’: A Literary Review of Orgasm as an Alternative Mode of Pain Relief in Childbirth., J Holist Nurs. 2015 Nov http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26578553

Hormonal Physiology of Childbirth http://transform.childbirthconnection.org/reports/physiology/

Pascali-Bonaro, Liem, Orgasmic Birth: The Best-Kept Secret, 2008 www.orgasmicbirth.com

Davis, E. Pascali-Boaro, D., Orgasmic.Birth: Your Guide.to.a Safe Satisfying and Pleasurable Birth Experience, New.York,.Rodale Books,.2010.

Kitzinger, Birth and Sex,  Pinter & Martin, 2012

Photo credit:
Woman Behind the film – third image, Debra as doula, © Monet Nicole