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Sex got you into this – can it get you out? Many heavily pregnant women turn to a number of methods in an attempt to start labour, including having sex. The bad news is that it doesn’t work.

Almost . The most common thing to try is a long walk, followed by having sex, ingesting spicy food and nipple stimulation.

There is good reason to assume that sex might get things going: sperm contains prostaglandins – chemicals that doctors use to induce labour. Orgasms are also associated with uterus contractions, and nipple stimulation is thought to increase oxytocin, a key hormone involved in the onset of labour.

But results from trials have been mixed: one study suggested that sex , while others have found it has no effect. Another study showed that women who had sex at term were actually before their scheduled induction. The only of the subject included just 28 women and didn’t draw any conclusions.

To get a more definitive answer, Luigi Carbone at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and his colleagues analysed all relevant randomised, controlled trials published before June 2019. Only three were high enough quality to include in their final analysis.

Overall, the trials included about 1500 healthy women having a single baby. Two of the trials asked women at term to have sex as many times as possible, while those in the control group were neither encouraged nor discouraged to have sex. Women in the third trial were asked to have sex at least two times a week after term, or to abstain completely.

The results showed that having sex made no difference to whether the women went into spontaneous labour or ended up with an artificial induction. On the other hand, the analysis showed no detrimental effect of having sex at term. One limitation of all three studies is that they involved self-reporting, so no one checked up on whether the women had sex or not.

So is there anything you can do to speed things up? There is , and the ingestion of spicy food has never been properly explored in a research setting. However, a review of six trials with 719 women found that nipple stimulation . The minimum breast stimulation needed was 1 hour each day for three days.