Emphasis on women and girl’s pleasure can help to combat gender-based violence across the life-course. This includes obstetric violence, which we define here as any form of disrespect, abuse or violence during perinatal care seeking in obstetric settings. Obstetric violence can come in the form of physical, verbal, or sexual abuse and other forms of discriminations based on age, class, caste, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socio-economic status, abilities, migration, marital status and for people who are at the intersections of these background characteristics. This abuse or discrimination, experienced, in the birthing environment, is part of the normalization of violence in the lives of women and birthing people.

We prioritize pleasure as a means to address obstetric violence because pleasure is seldom a feature of the narratives, contexts and discourses of women’s reproduction. Female centric expressions of sexuality are often sensationalized, for instance the censoring of feminized bodies, by blurring labor, birth and breastfeeding videos by social media platforms and blocking or flagging users who post them. These are embodied sexual experiences, which is why the gendered nature of obstetric violence is deeply shaming and psychologically scarring.

In patriarchal societies, feminized expressions of sexuality are either conceived to be consumed by hegemonic masculinity, or censored and/or punished whenever they represent another sphere, one that arises from women's and other identities' desire, pleasure, self-determination and empowerment. This dynamic paves the way to the deeply shaming and psychologically scarring gendered experiences of (sexual) obstetric violence.

In conversations about the sexual, reproductive and maternal health of women and other feminized identities, pleasure is rarely highlighted. On the contrary, there are many examples of censorship, shame and stigma in narratives of birth and women’s sexuality more broadly. Discourses of femininity often emphasize suffering, endurance, objectification, and gender-based violence.

Midwives and doulas have been unsung champions of enabling pleasurable births for centuries, while also reducing the over-medicalization of labor and births. However, discourses and subjective experiences on what make assisting and providing care in labor and birth pleasurable, are also largely missing in medical, evidence-based literature.

In this Research Topic, we invite inquiry into women and other birthing peoples’ experiences of passion, pleasure, happiness and exaltation in pregnancy and birth; and in care provider’s experiences of finding pleasure in the art, service and science of caregiving. Our aim is for this understudied aspect of physiological birth to provide fertile ground for research and understanding that will subversively act as a counterpoint to obstetric violence. We are pushing the envelope on reproductive justice towards the angle of reproductive pleasure.

We accept all article types accepted by Frontiers in Global Women’s Health. We are particularly interested in unique methods such as arts-based research, ethnographic, and other forms of qualitative research but are not limited to it. Please refer to this link for the article types you can submit.

Frontiers in Global Women’s Health and the editorial team invite contributions to this collaborative endeavor with the following focuses for manuscripts that include, but are not limited to:

- Exploring what makes the intimate world of labor and birth pleasurable from the perspective of women and other birthing people, care providers, supporters and companions
- Looking for a pathway to humanizing birth that combats and diminishes obstetric violence, disrespect and abuse during labor and birth.
- Exploring the conversations and language on embodied sexual, reproductive and maternal health that go beyond the narratives of self-discipline and self-preservation.
- Exploring what makes the birthing environment and people’s behavior around labor and birth pleasurable; be it through dark light, soothing sounds, tender touch, affection or the journey of orgasmic births
- Exploring birth-related research questions informed by fields such as midwifery, indigenous knowledge systems, feminisms, queer studies, reproductive justice theory, and care ethics.
- Understanding the role of birth practitioners who support healthy, physiologic birth in home births, orgasmic births, free births, humane hospital births and the conditions that support pleasure.

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Frontiers in Global Women's Health

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