MIA: Sex in the delivery room. It happens like this.

By MIA FREEDMAN

There are many things I wanted to do in the delivery room on each of the three occasions I gave birth:

1. Go home (“I can’t do this! I give up! I’m going hooooooome!”)

2. Be put out of my misery (“This hurts too much! Take me outside and run me over with the car. Pleeeeeeeeeeease.”)

3. Marry my anaesthetist after he gave me an epidural (“I can’t remember your name, Mr Doctor, but I really, really love you. No, I REALLY love you. No, I don’t think you understand HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU.”)

4. Eat and drink (“Right, now that I’m no longer pregnant I would really love some sushi and a cocktail.”)

5. Have sex Not so much. Because I just pushed a baby out of my vagina and the only thing I’d like to get intimate with in the near future is an ice-pack and a surfboard sized sanitary pad. You know?

But there are some women – and their partners – who do want to have sex in the delivery room. They really really want to.

On Mommyish, a midwife has written about the number of times she or her co-workers have caught patients having sex during labour or immediately after birth. “Throughout my tenure, I’ve noticed that labor and delivery brings out a lot of things in people. And one of them, apparently, is sex.”

Like the patient who was in early labour and was sent home by the nurse after an examination. Before the paperwork could be completed, the heavily pregnant woman and her partner decided to do it doggy-style in the examination room, covered (barely) by a flimsy curtain while two other couples in the same room listened incredulously.

“Now I know having sex is supposed to induce labor and all, but I call that taking things a bit too far”, writes the midwife, who adds:

“One nurse I know caught her patient with a man in her bed during her labor—and he wasn’t the father of the baby she was delivering.

While talking with my patient about the plan to have her get up to the shower, her boyfriend asked if he could help her. “Oh, of course,” I said gratefully. “That would be great.”

“See?” he said, shoving her playfully and waggling his eyebrows. “I told you they wouldn’t care if we got in the shower together!”

His girlfriend rolled her eyes at him. “She didn’t mean like that,” she said.

For another patient, no permission was necessary—one of my fellow nurses had the pleasure of walking in on a patient in the shower with her man.

I know some couples who have a ridiculously short gap between children – less than a year –  and I’ve often joked “Did you have sex in the delivery room, or what?”

But maybe? Maybe they actually did.

If you’ve had kids, how soon afterwards did you have sex? And did you do anything during labour as interesting as having sex?