Sexual Desire, Satisfaction Don't Diminish During Pregnancy

Study found first, second trimesters don't mean lowered interest for most women

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter

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WEDNESDAY, March 17 (HealthDay News) -- Although women have less sex as their pregnancy progresses, they don't enjoy the experience any less, new research shows.

"We've studied men's sexual health for many years, and we have not studied women's sexual health, concerns, issues and problems in the past, and there's a gender information gap," said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, editor-in-chief of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, in which this new study was recently published. "This kind of study helps narrow that gap and provide information on the real behavior of real women, and gives us a sense of what to expect."

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Goldstein is director of sexual medicine at Alvarado Hospital in San Diego.

The authors of this new study, out of Lisbon, Portugal, asked 188 women aged 17 to 40 to fill out a questionnaire the day they were discharged from the hospital after the birth of a child.

Almost half (44.7 percent) of women said that their most frequent sexual intercourse took place during the first trimester of the pregnancy. A little more than one third (35.6 percent) said sex was most frequent in the second trimester.

Only 10 percent said that the most frequent sexual activity occurred in the third trimester, while 55 percent said that sex decreased at this point.

But the majority of women -- 80.1 percent -- said they did have intercourse at this later stage of the pregnancy. And almost 40 percent of women said they had sex during the birth week.

Roughly half of all women said there had been no change in their sex life during the first or second trimesters.

Almost one-quarter (23.4 percent) of women admitted they were afraid that sex would hurt the baby.

In the course of researching her book, The Working Woman's Pregnancy Book, Dr. Marjorie Greenfield said that this fear sometimes came from the male partner.

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