I went on the site yesterday and couldn't find further information, but I did just now and they are for sure using orgasmic and ecstatic interchangeably:
Quote:
| "It is possible to have an ecstatic birth—in fact, that is the best natural high that I know of. And these states of consciousness are best reached when a woman is fully aware and fully awake. Women don’t have a way to know how their body works until they really try it out in birth. I think that women can be just completely surprised by the change in them from giving birth—you have something powerful in you—that fierce thing comes up—and I think babies need moms to have that fierceness—you feel like you can do anything and that’s the feeling we want moms to have." |
So... I get that. I had that experience for sure. I think, though, that the word "orgasmic" will be a challenge for people. And that's due to the cultural context of the word and event itself - the female orgasm is that ever-illusive, heavily-touted goal for all of us. There's a lot of heavy heavy contextual and historical elements of personal female sexuality that makes that tricky ground and changes how we, as women, are going to think of that word and what it means.
My initial fear was that they were using the term to mean an actual orgasm or the experience of intense vibratory or clitoral pleasure during labor or birth. And that, I fear, is far too hefty a goal for most women. On the other hand, when I realized that we're talking about the hormonal and physiological process of birth as analogous to an orgasmic experience, then that made far more sense. In that sense, emotionally and physiologically (due to the hormonal blueprint of birth), uninhibited birth is absolutely the same thing as orgasm. And the ecstatic nature of uninhibited birth is a beautiful thing to explore. It was touched on in The Business of Being Born towards the end when Michel Odent was talking about the scientific study of love and how it happens. That was my favorite part of that movie. He spoke like a philosopher or a poet, rather than as a doctor.
At any rate, yes - there are reasons for the hormones we experience in birth and those reasons are circumnavigated by the inhibiting of the hormonal process through modern technological birth. It's a crisis not just of safety for mothers and babies, but a crisis of love. The bonding of infants and mothers is paramount to our survival as a species and all our precautionary tactics, or as I like to call it, fear mongering, is harming families.
So beautifully put.
Beautiful Annakiss! 
