Pregnant Sex

Does it harm the baby?

Sex during pregnancy has long been one of medicine's gray areas. Obstetricians, with little and conflicting evidence to go on, variously advise couples concerned about harming the baby to abstain totally during pregnancy, to do whatever they want in any month, or to forgo orgasm in later months because it causes uterine contractions and might induce premature labor. Most often, they recommend avoiding intercourse during the last four to six weeks of pregnancy. Now comes a report that is bound to disturb expecting couples--perhaps unnecessarily.

Analyzing the outcome of almost 27,000 pregnancies, Pathologist Richard Naeye of Pennsylvania's Hershey Medical Center found that infections of the amniotic fluid cushioning the fetus, and the subsequent death of the baby, were more frequent among women who had intercourse in the month before delivery than in those who abstained. Also, according to his report in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, certain other problems, including respiratory distress and jaundice, were twice as common in infants whose mothers had been sexually active in their last month.

Dr. Naeye speculates that sperm or enzymes in the seminal fluid may somehow aid bacteria in penetrating the cervix and entering the uterus. But both Naeye and obstetricians are cautious about any wholesale proscriptions of sexual activity during pregnancy. They point out that the births studied took place between 1959 and 1966, when the fetal and infant death rate was much higher than now. Thus improved methods of caring for expectant mothers and newborn infants may have obviated some of the harm that could result from sex during pregnancy. Also, the analysis did not take into account the effect of intercourse before the last month.

A reasonable recommendation, suggests Dr. Arthur Herbst, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago in an editorial accompanying the report, is for women with a history of miscarriage--or whose cervix has begun to dilate--to avoid intercourse and orgasm inthelast trimester.

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