What Happened When This Woman Tried To Induce Labour Through Sex

There are plenty of theories that having sex helps to induce labour in pregnant people, but does it really work? Officially, the jury is still out. But one mum blogger was willing to give it a go (literally), and it worked out pretty well for her.

Sophie Cachia, who runs the blog The Young Mum, wrote about her most recent pregnancy in a post on Friday, explaining that her pregnancy "felt like it went for eternity."

"I was that crazy overdue pregnant woman googling EVERY possible natural induction technique," she wrote. "I’d been told to bathe in Clary Sage Oil because apparently it relaxes your uterus, to eat pineapple, and to have a good sex sesh. So I did all of the above."

"When you’re an overdue sweaty walrus and you need this baby to come out, you do what you gotta do," she said. "And when you’re the husband of this highly hormonal overdue sweaty walrus, you do what you’re told."

In the end, she said, it may have been the sex that did it — but maybe not in the way you'd think. Cachia had read that it's the semen that has an impact on inducing pregnancy, rather than the sex itself, so she set her husband on a somewhat specific task.

"I instructed Jaryd to go into the bathroom for some alone time with himself and his… hand," she wrote. "Let’s be brutally honest, there was more chance of me farting and shooting the baby out pain free than there was of me having an orgasm this heavily pregnant, so his swimmers were going to have to do!"

"As I got in position on hands and knees, whilst eating an apple and watching Suits, Jaryd came from behind and did what he needed to do. Literally."

Cachia can't be sure that's what did the trick, but at around midnight, she began having contractions and called an assessment centre at the hospital, which confirmed that she was in labor. Thirteen hours later, she had her newborn daughter, Florence, in her arms.

Cachia's certainly not the first to try to induce labour with sex — though Scott Sullivan, MD, director of maternal-fetal medicine at MUSC, did tell us last year that sex "should work, physiology-wise, but the studies have been disappointing."

But hey, it could be worth a shot.