International Week for Respecting Childbirth: May 16-23, 2010
Submitted by Lily on May 20, 2010 - 3:23pm
This week you have an official reason to celebrate childbirth: it’s the International Week for Respecting Childbirth! Orgasmic Birth’s world premiere was during the 2008 International Week for Respecting Childbirth, so we know from personal experience that it’s a great excuse to talk to people about how we can make birth better for mothers and babies around the world.
The theme of the week this year is “Birth Trauma, Birth Pleasure.” Auroramadre, an organization in Venezuela, was inspired by this theme to make two 9-minutes videos that focus on Traumatic Birth and Pleasurable Birth. While the videos are available only in Spanish right now, there will soon be English, Italian, and Portuguese versions posted to Youtube. The videos are well worth watching even if you’re not a Spanish-speaker as the images speak for themselves.
Hopefully these videos will also get your creative juices flowing, as Orgasmic Birth is soon going to be launching a video contest! Contestants will be challenged to create a 2-3 minute video that helps spread the message that pleasurable birth is possible. So put your thinking caps on: how has Orgasmic Birth impacted you and your community?
Please share your ecstatic or orgasmic birth story with us. Birth stories are a powerful way of passing along information and creating an awareness of all that is possible in birth. Click here to begin.
Expert Voices
“Pregnancy and childbirth can be an empowering experience for women. Unfortunately the models of care currently available in many parts of the world is disempowering women, overusing interventions (such as epidurals, caesarean-sections, oxytocin drips, and episiotomy) and transforming a physiological event in a biomedical procedure. Orgasmic Birth reminds us of the glory of women’s bodies, capable of metamorphosing in the journey into motherhood. Watching this film helps us re-think our role as maternity care providers and ‘gate-keepers’ of a ‘good’ birth. The sexual nature of childbirth is unexplored territory and a taboo for many of us but the film portrays beautifully what normal birth is about, through women's intimate stories and experiences of having orgasmic births, and how we can re-examine what we think we know about the act of giving birth. Working as an obstetrician and researcher, being a mother and a women’s health and rights activist, I feel this is a powerful documentary that can help create awareness of the power and possibility that birth can bring for women around the globe.” Maria Helena Bastos, MD, MSc, Obstetrician and Researcher in Midwifery and Women’s Health
