I had an orgasmic birth and heard my unborn child speaking to me during labour – it’s a sexual experience

Any woman who has given birth will likely say that labour was, no question, the most painful experience of their lives – but for a certain group of mothers, it was quite literally orgasmic. 

Roma Noriss, 41, from Somerset, is one such mother claiming to have had experienced an ‘orgasmic’ birth when delivering her daughter in 2011. 

Speaking to FEMAIL, Roma retold her unbelievable birth story in the hope of helping other women who have had a similar experience.

The parenting expert, who had already been through labour once with her eldest child, thought she knew what was coming from the delivery of her second child. However, what she experienced underneath the apple tree in her garden took her by surprise. 

‘It just sort of happened by accident,’ Roma said. ‘She came a month early and I was really cross at first because I was trying to finish my university diploma at the time.

‘But then I heard my [unborn] daughter’s voice. She was asking what I was waiting for.

‘I told her I was frightened that it would be painful. It was good to have that little check-in with her and that little moment to acknowledge that I was resisting it.’

After realising what she ‘needed to do’, Roma made her way out into her garden and positioned herself under her ‘gorgeous, enormous apple tree’.

‘I was just looking up at the sky and really feeling the tree,’ she remembered with a smile. ‘It sounds really weird but you get very ‘animal’ when you’re in that altered state’.

Roma, a former doula, acknowledged her altered animal-like state was a result of the ‘very, very strong hormones’ rushing around her body.

‘You are literally on drugs,’ she said. ‘You don’t release those levels of hormones and endorphins at any other point in your life.’

She explained women release DMT, or N,N-dimethyltryptamine, during birth which is a strong psychedelic drug that can alter a person’s thinking.

‘I started looking up at the stars and swaying my hips,’ Roma said. ‘Suddenly there was a really delicious sensation which I can’t describe any other way than orgasmic-like.

‘It was a ripple of pleasure that seeped down between my pelvis and down the back of my legs and to my knees.

‘It wasn’t a screaming orgasm but a very strong sensation of pleasure.’

Roma stayed in the orgasm-like state for ten minutes, theorising that it was caused by the oxytocin and the ‘pressure from the baby’.

She said: ‘It makes sense that birth can be orgasmic because the clitoris extends all the way round the birth canal so of course it is getting pressurised and stimulated’. 

However, despite experiencing the orgasmic sensation in the early stages of labour, it wasn’t entirely painless – and Roma took to the birthing tub as the contractions became more intense.

‘But I wasn’t frightened by that point,’ she reflected. ‘What you need for a birth to progress is relaxation.

‘Birth is a sexual experience and you can’t get away from that. It’s exactly the same thing that got the baby in there that gets the baby out.’

Lovisa Dahl, 39, agrees that giving birth is ‘part of female sexuality, in the same way as menstruation or menopause’.

Featuring on This Morning, the mother-of-three explained to hosts Cat Deeley and Ben Shepherd that she achieved sexual pleasure during labour with the help of her husband.

‘Giving birth is sexual,’ Lovisa said in early February. ‘We give birth with our sexual organs’.

‘If you focus on pleasurable sensations, you can reduce the perception of pain because the focus of the brain shifts.

But some viewers did not seem to enjoy the discussion, taking to X to say they were going to turn their television off.

One disgruntled viewer posted, ‘I’m off’ while another said, ‘This is so not a suitable topic for lunchtime TV, I’m not at all prudish but ffs!’

Defending Lovisa from the backlash she received, parenting consultant Roma told FEMAIL: ‘I really commend her for following her instincts and what her body was asking her to do.

‘Judgement usually comes from fear or guilt or shame. People who are frightened of birth or who have had a negative birth are usually the ones that are more outspoken about these things because it touches a nerve.

‘I just feel compassion for these people.’

Roma said she is happy to speak to people, including her own daughter, now 13, about her orgasmic birth.

‘I told her the birth story when she was little and I didn’t hold back details such as it feeling really pleasurable,’ she said.

‘I hope that the story can be something that is a resource for her in terms of her own motherhood.’ 

Milli Hill, who has written several bestselling pregnancy guides such as Give Birth Like a Feminist and The Positive Birth Book, told FEMAIL that orgasmic births are more common that you would expect.

Around six per cent of mothers claim they had an orgasmic birth while a quarter said they ‘love’ being in labour, according to a survey organised by Channel Mum and Milli in her capacity as founder of The Positive Birth Movement.

She said: ‘The idea of orgasmic birth shocks us because we are so conditioned to think of birth as an experience in which we are, at best, passive and at worst, distressed and traumatised. We don’t associate birth with pleasure.

‘But in fact, birth, like sex, is an experience which can take many forms, some of which come from our own expectations. 

‘If we are fearful and expecting it to be awful, it may well be. If we are empowered and expecting it to be life enhancing, it might be.’