Sex After Childbirth - 5 Things You Should Know!

Ok so you have had a baby:) If your baby is young and/or you are breastfeeding, sex may not be high on your agenda as you attend to the needs of your infant. You may also feel more like a milk bank than a sexual woman. Sometimes libido drops off the charts and you might feel like you will never want to have sex again.



1. Relax, You are Normal!
Low libido after childbirth is incredibly common.The reasons afor it are complex and involve such things as:



Self image after childbirth
suppression of oestrogen after birth causing vaginal discomfort during penetration
sleep deprivation
The all-consuming needs of your infant taking up all your mind space and time


2. Sex after Birth Can Sometimes be Uncomfortable
Although this is not always the case, sex can be uncomfortable after childbirth. Many women report a psychological hurdle they have to go through before they can be easy around it and this of course influences indirectly via the nervous system how relaxed they are and how lubricated they become on arousal. Vaginal lubrication is created in a few ways by the body but one of the main ways is directly influenced by oestrogen levels. After birth oestrogen levels plummet as oestrogen has a suppressive effect on breast milk production and if a mother continues to breastfeed then her oestrogen levels stay low. This can mean that although she may become normally aroused during sex, her vagina may not be as naturally lubricated. This is the same effect in the days just before or just after menstruation when vaginal dryness is common. If this is your issue then use a water based lubrication as these do not damage the latex used in condoms like oil based ones do which weaken it.

3. Medications can Cause Vaginal Dryness
Some conventional medications led to vaginal dryness be altering oestrogen levels or by directly affecting mucus production of mucus membranes. Some of these are:



Anti-histamine/oral nasal sprays
Urinary Tract infection treatments
Tamoxifen


4. Sex is not Compulsory immediately After Childbirth
There is really no pressure to jump back into having regular sex if you don't want to. However, many mothers report that sex after childbirth is a greater emotional experience after having had a baby with their partner in terms of closer emotional bonding. Your body may take a bit of time to recover and some women feel anxious about it being painful or about the changes that giving birth may have made to the way sex will feel to them or their partner. Often the biggest hurdle is the psychological one!

5. Myth: Women Who Have Had Cesareans Have Better Sex
A scientific study in 2005 looked at the effect of vaginal birth and caesarean birth on pain during intercourse. It was found that whereas only 20.6% of vaginal delivery mothers had any discomfort, as many as 40.7% of casearian mums had issues. It seems that delivering a baby vaginally brings extra blood supply to the pelvic and specifically vaginal area and this means that women more easily acheive multiple orgasms.