?Laura Dowrich-Phillips
Asked to describe labour, Facebook friends responded immediately with descriptions such as "gentle and long", "Oh God", and in one bizarre case, "big".
No one used the word orgasmic, yet, according to Debra Pascali-Bonaro, the childbirth process could be orgasmic if conducted under the right circumstances.
Her theory is explored in the film Orgasmic Birth, a documentary that she produced, directed and filmed.
The film was screened last Monday night at the Mamatoto Birth Centre in Belmont, before an audience comprising mainly women including doulas, midwives and expecting women. There were three men, including one known gynaecologist.
Sitting with WomanWise before the documentary aired, the American filmmaker laughed when asked which part of the labour process could be deemed orgasmic, a word that denotes joy.
"It's not always literal. Some women truly have birth orgasms so they use orgasmic in the literal sense but there is a much broader group of women that use orgasmic as you did, as joyful, as blissful, as transformative, so in our documentary we show many different women's experience with pleasurable, positive birth," she explained.
In the film, couples preparing for childbirth were caressing, kissing and hugging. Husbands were massaging their women in labour, providing solid support. Women were groaning, moaning, shouting as they squatted in warm tubs of water, knelt on their wooden decks at home and lay in the comfort of their beds to give birth. The pain was undeniable but all embraced the miracle of birth with a sated look.
The love hormone
The orgasmic feeling, said Pascali-Bonaro, varies from woman to woman.
"The one woman in the film who truly had an orgasm does that in her labour but my experience is that women who have incredible physical sensations have it in the second stage when they are pushing the baby out."
She explained that during labour there are high levels of the hormone oxytocin, also known as the love hormone, which contributes to female orgasms, and that, coupled with the baby pushing through the vagina, contributes to the orgasmic feeling.
"For me pushing was quite intense, I really felt like a bowling ball was coming out but the minute the baby was born, I felt that incredible release and that moment is ecstatic, it's the feeling that one, you did it, and two, you get to see your baby and you are meeting your baby for the first time. I felt like that was orgasmic, it was a heightened moment for me," recalled the 52-year-old mother of six.
The message, she advised, is not that every woman has to have an orgasm either in sex or in childbirth, but to let women know that there are options available to allow women to have an enjoyable birth experience even if the feeling is fleeting.
Pascali-Bonaro aims to dispel the notion that giving birth is a painful affair that should be viewed with fear and trepidation.
"As a child birth educator, if we only tell you it's fear and pain and difficult, then there is a certain amount you will have self-fulfilling and I think the media has done us a disservice by portraying birth as an emergency waiting to happen."
A doula for over 25 years, Pascali-Bonaro is an advocate for keeping the labour process as natural as possible. She promotes the use of water, dim lights, exercise balls, massages, doulas and midwives, as well as a strong support system to enable women to have a truly joyful labour.
Technology overused
Creating the right environment, she advocates, contributes to a decrease in the use of drugs such as epidurals and caesarean procedures for normal births.
The film is in fact pretty critical of these options and compares and contrasts couples who choose natural delivery in comforting environments as opposed to those who go to the hospital where the treatment is impersonal and the process more intense, often leading to complications, use of drugs and surgery.
"There are good nurses, midwives and doctors in hospitals but institutional policies and practices override what we know are safe for babies and mothers," said one of the many medical experts interviewed in the film.
"The message is that technology has its time and place but it's being overused," said Pascali-Bonaro.
She said the idea for the movie came to her in a dream. Having worked with births around the world, she was distraught about the portrayal of births in the media.
"I was sound asleep and I woke up with an absolute dream and it was so vivid I woke my husband up and said I have to make this film.
"Twenty-five years ago when I first began as an educator I felt more women came to childbirth classes with more confidence, they came with a joyfulness, looking forward to birth and in the last ten years, women began coming to classes showing more fear. I wanted women to see a new side of birth and have the ability to decide for themselves what's best for them and their baby," she explained.
Trinidad and Tobago is the 35th country in which the film aired since its release a year ago. Women and men who see the film, Pascali-Bonaro said, immediately change their birthing plans. She said in Brazil, where it screened at the Rio Film Festival, the Ministry of Health bought the licence to show the film all over the country in a bid to decrease the high rate of caesarean procedures.
In order to counter the prevailing image of births in the media, Pascali-Bonaro said she was currently in talks with executives in Los Angeles to do a reality show featuring midwives and doulas.
Now bitten by the film bug, she is already scripting another film that will also focus on births, her number one passion.