, to forbid intercourse during pregnancy.[14]

During recent years, nevertheless, there has been an increasingly strong
tendency among obstetricians to speak decisively concerning intercourse
during pregnancy, either by condemning it altogether or by enjoining great
prudence. It is highly probable that, in accordance with the classical
experiments of Dareste on chicken embryos, shocks and disturbances to the
human embryo may also produce injurious effects on growth. The disturbance
due to coitus in the early stages of pregnancy may thus tend to produce
malformation. When such conditions are found in the children of perfectly
healthy, vigorous, and generally temperate parents who have indulged
recklessly in coitus during the early stages of pregnancy it is possible
that such coitus has acted on the embryo in the same way as shocks and
intoxications are known to act on the embryo of lower organisms. However
this may be, it is quite certain that in predisposed women, coitus during
pregnancy causes premature birth; it sometimes happens that labor pains
begin a few minutes after the act.[15] The natural instinct of animals
refuses to allow intercourse during pregnancy; the ritual observance of
primitive peoples very frequently points in the same direction; the voice
of medical science, so far as it speaks at all, is beginning to utter the
same warning, and before long will probably be in a position to do so on
the basis of more solid and coherent evidence.

Pinard, the greatest of authorities on puericulture, asserts that
there must be complete cessation of sexual intercourse during the
whole of pregnancy, and in his consulting room at the Clinique
Baudelocque he has placed a large placard with an "Important
Notice" to this effect. Fere was strongly of opinion that sexual
relations during pregnancy, especially when recklessly carried
out, play an important part in the causation of nervous troubles
in children who are of sound heredity and otherwise free from all
morbid infection during gestation and development; he recorded in
detail a case which he considered conclusive ("L'Influence de
l'Incontinence Sexuelle pendant la Gestation sur la Descendance,"
_Archives de Neurologie_, April, 1905). Bouchacourt discusses the
subject fully (_La Grossesse_, pp. 177-214), and thinks that
sexual intercourse during pregnancy should be avoided as much as
possible. Fuerbringer (Se