Orgasmic Births? The Internet is Lying to Mothers and It's Exhausting

Let’s just sit with this for a second: parenting has never been easy, but doing it while being bombarded by thousands of conflicting opinions every single day might be one of the most mentally exhausting things modern mothers face. One moment you’re finally figuring out how to get your baby to nap longer than 20 minutes, and the next, you’ve somehow ended up in a thread where someone is passionately arguing that sleep is a capitalist construct and you're traumatizing your child by putting them in a crib at all. What started as a search for advice turns into a spiral of self-doubt. Instead of support, you find judgment wrapped in pretty language and beige-toned aesthetics.

And I say that from experience.

When I was a brand new mom, social media felt like a lifeline. It was comforting, at first to see other women up at all hours, sharing their stories, venting about cluster feeding or the 4-month sleep regression. It made me feel less alone, like I was part of something bigger. I could scroll during those long, dark nights and feel seen. But that sense of solidarity started to crumble when I realized how quickly support could morph into pressure. Suddenly, each swipe served up a shit ton of advice, critiques, and hot takes, all competing for my attention.

Everyone had a suggestion, and most of them contradicted the one I read just five minutes before. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about bonding over the struggles it was about doing everything “the right way.” And let me tell you: it is paralyzing to parent when you’re being told constantly that there’s only one right way to do it.

There are too many voices. Too many extremes. Too many people online claiming they’ve figured out the one true way to mother, and if you’re not doing it like they are, you must be doing it wrong.

If you’ve ever found yourself feeling not just overwhelmed but straight-up inadequate after fifteen minutes of scrolling, you’re not alone. There is an entire ecosystem online right now convincing moms that “natural” is always better, that “intuition” trumps decades of medical research, and that you are less free, less connected, less evolved if you choose what they consider mainstream parenting. It’s not just misleading. It’s manipulative. And when it shows up in the context of motherhood, something already deeply emotional and personal, it becomes downright harmful.

There’s this fantasy version of motherhood being sold online right now. She’s glowing, centered, and always barefoot in her garden. Her children have never seen a screen. Her house is full of handmade Waldorf dolls, and her “playroom” looks more like a design showroom than a space that sees real-life tantrums. She births her babies in a candlelit tub surrounded by women in linen with crystals tucked into their bras and describes her labor as empowering, transcendent, even orgasmic. I wish I were exaggerating, but I’ve been sent the posts and seen them with my own eye. Apparently, there’s a solid twenty percent of women who now claim that their home birth was so blissful that they experienced literal waves of pleasure during it. Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here wondering if we’re failing because we needed someone to hold our legs while we screamed for hours on end.

But let’s keep going because it doesn’t stop at orgasmic birth. There are women online right now claiming that if you really connect to your womb during pregnancy, your baby will telepathically guide you through labor. Others swear that if you drink the right herbal infusions, you’ll avoid tearing. There are posts suggesting that ultrasounds are actually a tool of fetal surveillance (yes, as in “the government is watching your unborn baby”), that your child’s eye color will be dimmed if you vaccinate them, and that a mother’s trauma is permanently embedded in the baby’s DNA unless she clears it through energy work before labor begins.

And you know what? If those rituals feel grounding to you, go for it. Seriously. I’m not here to bash individual choices. What I’m pushing back on is the culture that turns these practices into doctrine, and then SELLS them to other mothers as the only truly conscious way to give birth.

This is where the problem lies. These aren’t just personal stories anymore. They’re packaged as paths to empowerment. They’re preached as the enlightened route. They are used to imply that if your birth involved Pitocin, or a monitor, or a nurse checking your dilation with a gloved hand, then you’ve somehow betrayed your sacred feminine essence. That you weren’t brave enough. That you gave up your power.

It’s a new kind of shame, but it hits just as hard as the old kind. And when you’re in the fog of early motherhood, vulnerable, hormonal, unsure, and looking for answers, it can pull you in fast.

First, it’s a few posts about essential oils. Then you’re being told baby Tylenol is toxic, formula is poison, your pediatrician is lying, and your baby will never reach their true vibrational frequency if they don’t sleep on an organic lambswool mattress under a Himalayan cotton blanket that has been smudged by a certified moon doula.

It’s all positioned under the guise of freedom. Of waking up. But freedom should feel freeing, not terrifying. Real freedom is being able to trust your choices, not feeling like every decision is either a triumph of the soul or a total spiritual failure.

These spaces almost always erase the realities of class, access, race, and trauma. As if everyone has the time, money, and mental bandwidth to spend their pregnancy baking sourdough from scratch, attending intuitive breathwork, and rejecting all forms of modern care. As if medical interventions are only a result of ignorance or fear, and not a vital part of maternal survival for millions of women around the world.

There is a vast difference between informed consent and fear-based indoctrination. Between intuition and denial. Between personal choice and public messaging that masquerades as empowerment while peddling guilt.

I’ve had four babies. None of my births were orgasmic.

I mean, what the fuck is an orgasmic birth?

All of them were intense, sacred, real, and different. I’m grateful for skilled providers. I’m grateful for medicine. I’m grateful for the epidural. I am no less empowered for using it during some of my births.

And I want moms to know, especially first-time moms, that you do not need to perform your motherhood for the internet. You don’t need to reject medical care to prove your intuition is strong. You don’t need to drink raw milk, bathe in oat milk, or decode your baby’s birth chart to be doing it right.

You just need to love your child, ask good questions, and do your best. That is enough.

So the next time the algorithm hands you a video of a woman claiming her baby was born fully potty-trained because she practiced “elimination communication from the womb,” I want you to do one thing: laugh. And then log off. Because your worth as a mother isn’t defined by how aligned, non-toxic, or spiritually attuned your parenting looks on Instagram. It’s defined by how deeply you show up for your kids, how willing you are to grow, how much you’re trying in the quiet moments when no one is clapping.

If motherhood feels hard, you are not broken. You are doing it. And that, in all its messy, beautiful, contradictory glory, is the real thing.

But sometimes, and this is important, the best thing you can do for yourself as a mom is unplug. Log out of Instagram. Log off TikTok. Mute the influencers who make you feel like you're drowning in inadequacy. Unfollow the accounts that dress shame up as consciousness. Silence the noise, even if just for a day. Or a week. Or longer.

You don’t need a digital detox retreat in the desert. You just need boundaries. Simple things. Like moving social media apps off your home screen so you don’t tap them on autopilot. Giving yourself one or two specific times a day to check your feed and being intentional about what voices you’re allowing in. Let yourself be bored again. Let yourself just be with your baby without narrating it for the internet.

Replace screen time with soul time. Text a friend who makes you laugh. Write down something you did well today, even if it was “I fed everyone and kept my cool during a meltdown.” Go outside without headphones. Drink your coffee hot. Journal. Listen to an audiobook that isn’t about parenting. Sit on your porch and stare at nothing. Let your nervous system have a break from the pressure to improve, fix, optimize, or elevate.

You don’t need to prove your motherhood through your content. You don’t need to participate in every trend or read every debate or react to every hot take. The more you consume, the more confused you’ll be. But the more you slow down, get quiet, and return to what actually feels good and grounded in your body, your home, and your relationships, the more clarity you'll find.

Motherhood is already noisy enough. You don’t need to let someone else’s idea of perfection live rent-free in your head.

Let’s normalize a motherhood that’s rooted in reality, not performance. Let’s make peace louder than pressure. And let’s give ourselves permission to parent in private. Quietly. Confidently. And without needing a single stranger’s approval.