Can You Orgasm From Kissing While Pregnant?

By Irin Carmon | May 5, 2010 | 5:00pm

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J-Lo’s character in The Back-Up Plan orgasms 30 seconds into making out, allegedly due to side-effects of pregnancy. Hollywood fantasy or real thing?

Normally I would rather get paper cuts on my eyes than watch this thing, but when we heard that The Back-Up Plan contains such a scene, I took one for the team. (Not as bad as you’d think!)

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So the mystery begins when Lopez’s character is told by a friend who’s already been pregnant that it makes you horny because three times the amount of blood is coursing through your veins. “I was so sensitive, I could have an orgasm sitting on a bus,” she says enthusiastically.

And sure enough, when J-Lo’s character actually starts making out with Alex McLoughlin’s, they’ve barely made clothed contact when she starts to have an orgasm (seen here), to their mutual surprise. Later, after they actually have sex, he says to her, “What was that, three or four times for you?”

Given that women who have actually been pregnant were highly skeptical of this claim last week, we decided to look into it.

It’s been suggested elsewhere that the increase in blood volume leads to a hypersensitive clitoris, which makes a little bit more sense than “pregnancy hormones make you come all the time.” We asked our indispensable friend Doc Gurley to shed some light. Turns out this is sort of possible! But only sort of.

She says,

On the pregnancy front, there is indeed a massive increase in the volume of a woman’s blood during pregnancy, but, frankly, doubling your blood volume leads, medically, to puffy ankles and feeling short of breath on a treadmill – not hair-trigger orgasms. In fact, most studies show that nausea, fatigue, and malaise lead to a decrease in sexual activity in the first trimester (not many people get horny by puking…).

J-Lo’s character is in her third trimester in the above scene, during which fatigue and nausea are the most common. It’s actually more plausible that she would have an instant orgasm during the second trimester, when the nausea and fatigue tend to subside:

A gazillion tons of estrogen (that’s a precise medical term) are coursing through your veins, engorging the nipples, breasts, clitoris, uterus and vagina, all of which are hulking up for the big day and doing a thriving happy dance the likes of which your body hasn’t seen since puberty.

In turn, a pregnant woman’s body kicks in with more testosterone, which leads to hair growth, and an increase in libido. “But whether these factors lead to hair-trigger (or bus-bumping) orgasms is another question altogether,” says the Doc. “Studies do show that some women (non-pregnant) can have orgasms with minimal foreplay, or without even being touched. But it’s rare.”

By the third trimester, pregnant women tend to be far less interested in sex. Bottom line?

Yes, there is an increase in libido for many women in pregnancy, but mostly during the middle months. And not, except in Hollywood, the kind that gives you an orgasm on the bus – otherwise mass transit, for $2, would be full of satisfied women, making the rounds. As to having an orgasm a few seconds into foreplay – well, that one’s marginally more plausible.

Actually, for a Hollywood rom-com, “marginally plausible” is a pretty good record.

Doc Gurley [Official Site]

Related: How Does Pregnancy Affect Libido? [Everyday Health]
How J-Lo’s Screaming Orgasm Redefines ‘Family’ [HuffPo]