Pregnancy: Fellatio Prevents Pre-Eclampsia

Pre-eclampsia is a condition where the mother’s blood pressure soars, in some cases triggering convulsions, coma and death. It typically starts after the 20th week of pregnancy, though it can occur earlier. It usually occurs only during pregnancy and affects both the mother and the fetus. Pre-eclampsia affects the placenta, and it can affect the mother’s kidney, liver, and brain.

Did you know that when pre-eclampsia causes seizures, it turns into the condition known as eclampsia — the second leading causes of maternal death in the U.S.

Pre-eclampsia and other pregnancy disorders like infertility, all appear to be linked to the reluctance of the mother’s immune system to accept the fetus and placenta, both of which come armed with an arsenal of foreign proteins courtesy of the father’s genes.

With the manner of how the fetus stay in the womb: it’s placenta invading the wall of the uterus, infiltrating a nearby artery to guarantee steady flow of oxygen and nutrients; no wonder the mother’s immune system would be tempted to annihilate that developing fetus. You may be surprised though, that in normal pregnancies, it lets it be.

This is because of the presence of fetal cells in the maternal circulation, which means that there’s also plenty of antigen poresent, and thus, an enormous amount of immune modulation that prevents the rejection. How is the immune modulation done by the woman’s immune system?

It starts with the first drop of semen, and for the next 15 hours or so, the woman’s cervix is swimming with immune cells. These immune cells collect the man’s foreign proteins, even the entire sperm cells, and carry them back to the lymph nodes where other immune cells learn to recognise them. In normal circumstances, these foreign proteins do end up on the immune system’s “most wanted list”, where antibodies would be made to fight against them the next time they dare enter the territory. In this case, it won’t do that, because semen contains not only millions of sperm loaded with proteins, but also some recently discovered components that tilt a woman’s immune response away from hostility and towards acceptance.

Pierre-Yves Robillard, a neonatologist, showed that under normal circumstances semen exposure actually helps prevent pre-eclampsia. Robillard speculated from his studies that the mother’s immune system requires time (and contact with semen) to learn to accept the father’s foreign genes and not attack the placenta and cause pre-eclampsia. Changing fathers between pregnancies “puts your counter back at zero, immunologically speaking”. Furthermore, in his next study, he confirmed his hunched when out of 1011 pregnant women, only 5% of women who had sex with the father for 12 months or more before getting pregnant developed pre-eclampsia compared to a massive 40% for those who only had sex with the father for four months or less.

Gustaaf Dekker, a member of the Adelaine group (University of Adelaide in South Australia) took the study one step further when he looked to see if the same goal could be achieved with fellatio, or commonly known as oral sex. Fellatio, or, more precisely, fellating to the point of orgasm, is also commonly referred to as a blow job.

Since our immune systems tolerate things better when they entered the body via mouth, it’s not surprising when we’re not usually allergic to the food we consume, even though it’s always genetically foreign. When Dekker compared 41 pregnant women with pre-eclampsia and 44 without, he found that 82% of those without pre-eclampsia practised fellatio, compared with only 44% of those with the disorder. And come to think of it, the protective effect of oral sex was strongest when women actually swallow the semen rather than coughing it onto the pillow!

Like many other studies, it still has so much to undergo to verify such claims. But I do hope it would be soon enough to help those women suffering from pregnancy disorders.