Navelgazing Midwife sums it up.

Extreme isn’t even the word for Friday night's 20/20 on ABC. Bizarre was more like it. I was extremely disappointed that topics such as thinking a baby doll was real was mixed with extremely extended breastfeeding. I have a hard time understanding that orgasmic birth is seen as just as “extreme,” but I suppose it is.



The segments on Friday night’s 20/20 were a mismatch of oddities mixed with small doses of causes/wishes I can get myself behind.



The first segment was on orgasmic birth.


While filmmaker Debra Pascali-Bonaro tried to explain there isn’t a goal of orgasmic birth, that it isn’t a competition, but that pleasure in birth can be a possibility for some women... and a more pleasurable birth is available for all women... her words were squashed by images of a woman clearly having an amazing, continuously orgasmic birth.



In reading complaints about the show, the issue of combining orgasms with one’s child squicks many. I’m not sure how to adequately explain that the child isn’t being used for pleasure, but the experience of labor and birth are sensuous even without the addition of the expulsion explosion. Sexual abuse information is so pervasive in our society, it isn’t unusual that many someones would use it to mix up the birth-orgasm-as-child-abuse topic. I am pretty surprised 20/20 didn’t address this aspect, but I think there was enough other fodder for them to pull from.

Those of us in the know understand that orgasmic/pleasurable/tolerable births are more likely to happen at home than at the hospital.