Natural childbirth advocates profess puzzlement that the promotion of their personal preferences as “normal” birth is disrespectful to women who make different choices. To help them understand why their rhetoric is hurtful, hateful and utterly self referential, I offer a thought experiment. Let’s apply the Lamaze philosophy on “normal” birth to sex.
Below is a paraphrase of the Lamaze position paper, Promoting, Supporting, and Protecting Normal Birth. Natural childbirth advocates: do you see the parallels and why the insistence that your personal preferences represent nature’s ideal is so distasteful?
Promoting, Supporting, and Protecting Normal Sex
by The Institute for Safe and Healthy Sex
Sex in the 21st century is characterized by choices and practices directly antithetical to normal, natural and physiologic processes. Nature designed sex to occur only between one man and one woman, within the context of a permanent pair-bonded relationship, and always leading to pregnancy. In contrast to what we know about the physiologic process of sex, society now countenances homosexual relationships, sex outside of marriage or even outside of a relationship and artificial contraception. These practices are alarming because there is no research demonstrating that choices like homosexuality, oral sex and contraception respect and facilitate normal physiology.
The normal, natural, physiologic process of sex involves a sequence of interacting events: the male erection, vaginal lubrication, ejaculation, etc. It is exquisitely orchestrated by male and female hormones and facilitated by the missionary position. Restriction to the missionary position helps men and women tolerate increasing levels of oxytocin (the love hormone), and this ultimately ensures not only that sex will progress, but they will benefit from the release of endorphins, nature’s narcotic.
The Institute for Safe and Healthy Sex encourages men and women to be confident in their ability to have heterosexual sexual intercourse. The Institute further encourages health-care providers and policy makers to understand and trust the normal, natural process of heterosexual intercourse and to promote, support, and protect men’s and women’s confidence and their ability to have heterosexual intercourse without the unnatural distractions of abnormal sexual practices or artificial contraception.
The Institute of Safe and Healthy Sex has identified six care practices, that promote, support, and protect normal heterosexual intercourse:
Practice #1: All men and women must recognize and acknowledge that Nature designed sex to occur only between one man and one woman.
Practice #2: Sex should be restricted to only heterosexual, monogamous, long term relationships (ideally marriage), because that is the only physiologic situation.
Practice #3: No artificial interference with fertility.
Practice #4: All sex should have to potential for conception. Accordingly, there should be no homosexual sex and no oral or anal sex.
Practice #5: Sex should be restricted to the missionary position because it affords the best possibility for conception, which is what Nature intended.
Practice #6: There should be no artificial components to heterosexual intercourse. Synthetic lubricants, vibrators and sex toys interfere with the physiologic sex that nature intended.
The goal of the Institute for Safe and Healthy Sex preparation for sex is that men and women have confidence in their inherent ability to have normal, heterosexual intercourse. In Institute for Safe and Healthy Sex sex education classes, men and women learn to understand and trust normal, natural, physiologic sex and avoid homosexual tendencies, non-normal sexual practices, and artificial contraception. The Institute for Safe and Healthy Sex encourages all men and women to attend sex education classes that promote the six care practices described above and that increase their confidence in their ability to have sex normally.
The mission of the Institute of Safe and Healthy Sex the is to promote, support, and protect normal sex through education and advocacy. The Institute for Safe and Healthy Sex was launched to support initiatives that provide credible, relevant, and useful information about normal sex to young men and women and to advance the agenda of promoting, supporting and protecting normal sex.
