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How's Your Sex Life?

Great Sex Matters When You're Trying to Conceive

By Jane Merrill

ercourse has to partake of the whole flow. And the women are counting dates!"

Intoxicating sex is an incomparable, invisible energy exchange of you and your partner, part of what the French describe well as la vie du couple or the life of the couple.

"Today we make it so complicated," says Dr. Wei Huang. "Each step of the continuum – intercourse, getting pregnant, staying pregnant – has a responsibility and a flow. To avoid defects in the process or the child, work on your lifestyle. Align all dimensions: physical, sexual, psychological, financial. Prepare 100 percent. Intercourse in the spirit of giving rejuvenates energy rather than depletes it."

But does the mother's sex life during pregnancy affect the baby like a sprightly lullaby or a baleful aria? I consulted Dr. David Sable, director of reproductive endocrinology at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., where infertile people from all over the world come for high-tech healing.

"Can we boil down the quality of sex to what will impregnate? No," he says. "And if anybody figures out the formula for attraction and arousal, I don't want to know. Let's keep the mystery. Note how sex thrives throughout the pregnancy for many couples. The biological duty is done, yet there is a continuance of pleasure. Except in the unusual event of bleeding in the uterine lining, there is no reason to abstain. I emphasize that pregnancy loss is embedded in the embryo. Pregnancies are hardy things."

"Whether or not we find what we are seeking is idle, biologically speaking," writes poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. She seems to be speaking for what medicine knows not, but what Dr. Morgentaler suggests and hopes may be known in the future.