sensual birth

I think it's a lot like sex -- there have been periods in history when women were expected not to like sex but to do it as a duty -- and so they didn't like it, and those that did were "whores". (In birth, it's "normal" for labor to be this miserable thing, and those for whom it isn't miserable are regarding as aberrations of nature -- flukes.) There are still unfortunately a lot of women who have sex and don't like it. But there are enough of us that do, to know that painful/unpleasant sex is a crock. That's not the way it's meant to be. A large part of sex being pleasant (and it wasn't always) for me is psychological. So I'm working on changing my attitudes about birth. I'm also going to do some of the same things in birth that I do to during sexual foreplay -- I mean, I don't consider having sex without doing that first, and birth uses the same hormones... so, it just seems logical to me to treat birth as a sexual event. I'm not saying that my goal is an orgasm. My goal is to get my body flooding with the hormones that will put my body into an ideal state for birthing. And I strongly suspect that when this happens it will be pleasurable. I've had glimpses of it so I know it's possible. My last two births (while painful during the labor itself) were very sensual, at the moment that the baby descended and came through me. It was an incredible, wonderful feeling. The word "voluptuous" comes to mind.

Here's a wonderful article by Sarah Buckley (here at Mothering) about the biological basis for sensual birth. (She's writing a book about it too, due 2005!) http://www.mothering.com/11-0-0/html...ic-birth.shtml

Here's also some articles from Laura Shanley on the subject: http://www.ucbirth.com/sensualbirth.htm