The Anatomy and Evolution of Childbirth and Female Orgasm

And why I hate the myth of orgasmic birth

Fine I’ll admit it: I’m crunchy. In fact, I come from a family so crunchy that we grew up in a house with no television, bought fresh goat milk from our crunchy friends, and sang a long, harmonious “om” before eating dinner every night. When we got sick, my mom would make us tea with honey and give us homeopathic remedies with names that I still can’t pronounce. I don’t think I even knew of the existence of Tylenol until I was in my teens.

Then, in college, I decided to pursue a degree in biology, hung out with premeds, and spent my summers working in a lab doing horrible things to fish in order to further the field of neuroscience and epigenetics. I started questioning a lot of my families’ long-standing beliefs. Things I had grown up accepting as self-evident truths (of course homeopathy works) were now subject to my newfound scientific scrutiny: why didn’t any of it hold up in randomized controlled trials?

Since graduating I’ve always walked the line between the two (crunchy and scientific, a.k.a “scrunchy”) and when, at age 30, it came time to make a birth plan for my first child, it was as scrunchy as I was. I decided to go ahead with a hospital birth, partly because my insurance covered it and partly because I was scared, but to compensate for what I knew would be an overly-medicalized, male-dominated environment, I went all-out crunchy in my birth preparation. I did Spinning Babies, prenatal yoga, acupuncture, ate my weight in dates and drank copious amounts of raspberry tea. I bought a natural pregnancy and birth preparation book and started following holistic pregnancy and birth influencers on social media.

In retrospect, I think most of it was utterly useless (except maybe the yoga) but otherwise benign. However, there was one thing that I think was genuinely harmful when it came to my ultra crunchy birth preparation: I let myself be convinced by the natural birthing influencers that the pain of childbirth was purely psychological, and that if I just learned to relax and let go, not only could I have a pain-free birth, but I could have an orgasmic birth.

Now, I have had more than one orgasm in my lifetime. They feel good. I have also pushed out two babies, one of them without pain medication. It feels bad. So, with all due respect, my conclusion is: influencers who are pushing the orgasmic birth agenda have either never had a baby or never had an orgasm (or maybe neither).

The reason I feel this is harmful (the reason I feel it harmed me) is that if you allow women to believe that childbirth doesn’t have to be painful, then they cannot mentally prepare themselves for the inevitable pain. The naked truth is that human childbirth is a bitch, and there are very good evolutionary reasons for why this is the case. Trying to sugarcoat it or deny the pain and risk involved is just another way of gaslighting women and of making us feel personally responsible for a sort of anatomical injustice that has been millions of years in the making.

It’s also (I believe) grounded in some real misunderstandings of female anatomy and physiology, biology, and evolution. And that brings me to the real purpose of this article. We are going to debunk two widely-held (but somewhat related) myths:

1. Vaginal stimulation (alone) causes orgasm for most women.

2. Birth does not have to be painful: it’s all in your head.

We are going to look at the science and anatomy of birth and orgasm. Then we are going to examine the evolutionary story behind birth and orgasm (why one is so painful and one is so pleasurable). And finally, we will look at attitudes towards female orgasm and pain in childbirth in hunter-gatherer societies (because, once again, I think they got it right).