Go Ahead and Have Sex After Your Covid Vaccine
Happy New Year! It doesn’t entirely feel like a fresh start because the pandemic is getting worse before it gets better and the GOP is indulging Trump in one last temper tantrum before he leaves in a few short (or painfully long) weeks. But I have a new haul of notebooks, pens, and stickers—because there’s nothing more hopeful than a blank piece of paper and an extra-fine-tipped pen—and a renewed resolve to stay organized, productive, and hydrated (drinking enough water has always been a challenge for me). While we’re in a New Year’s Resolution frame of mind, check out this article that I wrote for Bedsider right before the holidays for some healthy, sexy resolutions. In writing it, I learned that the ritual of setting intentions for the new year dates back over 4,000 years. Maybe there’s something to it, but past experience makes me skeptical—I’ll let you know about the water intake somewhere around Valentine’s Day. In the meantime, if your 2021 resolution is to never miss Sex on Wednesday, try adding the email address to your contacts as substack newsletters often get caught in promotions folders or labeled as spam.
Woman Pregnant with Triplets Conceived on Different Days
TikTok user @theblondebunny1 is documenting a unique pregnancy for her followers; though she is growing three fetuses, they’re not exactly triplets because they were not all conceived on the same day. Her doctors have confirmed that while two of the fetuses are the same gestational age, the third is ten days younger. Technically this means that she was already pregnant with twins when she got pregnant again. It’s called superfetation.
This is not how it’s supposed to work. When those of us with uteri get pregnant, our bodies start producing hormones to block ovulation. No need to keep popping out eggs if there is already a fertilized one developing. The body also creates a “mucus plug” in the cervix to block anything from getting in or out during the pregnancy (man, we talk about cervical mucus a lot in this newsletter). And, the lining of the uterus changes in ways designed to protect and nurture the growing embryo that actually make implantation of a second (or third) fertilized egg more difficult.
In the case of superfetation, all three things would have to go wrong (or right, depending on how you look at it). The person would have to ovulate despite the fact that a fertilized egg has implanted in the uterus (which is the moment that a pregnancy becomes official), sperm would have to get past the mucus plug to fertilize that unexpected egg, and the resulting zygote would have to implant under less-than-ideal circumstances. In the rare cases in which this happens, the two pregnancies usually implant within weeks of each other. Doctors can distinguish superfetation from fraternal twins (a pregnancy in which two eggs are fertilized and implant at the same time) because one fetus is a different gestational age. There aren’t very many documented cases of superfetation though it could be somewhat more common than we think—without cause for investigation, two babies born at the same time would be assumed to be twins.
I first heard about this in 2015 from an eight-year-old. She told me that one of her parents had read an article about twins with different fathers. I was skeptical. I told her that bodies don’t work that way (she was eight, I refrained from saying “that’s not how it f**king works”). Then I did some research and had to apologize. She was right. There was a case a few towns over in which a woman identified her ex-partner as the father of her twins but admitted to having had sex with another man around the time she got pregnant. A paternity test found that the ex was the father of one of the babies but not the other. According to a doctor who spoke to Time Magazine about that case, this happens in about 1 out of 13,000 paternity cases for twins.
A few years later, an even more unique case of superfetation made news. Jessica Allen served as a gestational surrogate for a couple that was unable to get pregnant. Though the couple’s names were never released, they have been identified as Chinese (one CNN story suggested they were living in China where surrogacy is illegal). Jessica was implanted with one male embryo made from the couple’s egg and sperm, and a pregnancy was confirmed. Six weeks later, an ultrasound revealed a second fetus. The logical explanation for this was that the embryo had split, and she was carrying the couple’s identical twins. Jessica did not see the babies when they were born, but when they were a few weeks old, the couple texted her pictures and expressed concern that the two boys did not appear to be twins. A paternity test confirmed that Allen and her husband were the biological parents of the second baby who they are now raising.
It does not look like there are any paternity or maternity issues for @theblondebunny1 and her husband. They are the biological parents of all three fetuses she is carrying but some day the twins (who may be identical or fraternal) will likely lord their extra 10 days of gestation over their “younger” sibling.
Go Ahead and Have Sex After Your COVID Vaccine
Vaccines are miracles of science. In this country we’ve eradicated (or nearly eradicated) diseases from smallpox to polio to the measles; diseases that killed some and left others with a lifetime of health issues. Today, we can protect ourselves from certain forms of pneumonia, meningitis, and hepatitis. Nobody needs to get whooping cough or mumps. Our kids don’t know from the oven mitts and oatmeal baths of chicken pox. Our parents don’t have to suffer the pain of shingles. We can keep flu outbreaks to a minimum. And, we even have a vaccine that prevents cancer (hint: it’s the HPV vaccine and widespread coverage could nearly eliminate cervical cancer).
But too many people have decided—most based just on bad information—that vaccines are unsafe or worse, some sort of big pharma conspiracy to hurt us. Now that we have two much-awaited vaccines to protect us from Covid-19, anti-vaxxers are going out of their way to pile on more misinformation in an effort to sow misunderstanding, distrust, and chaos. Because these vaccines were developed with mRNA technology that sounds like it’s from a futuristic sci-fi thriller (but has actually been 30 years in development), the scare tactic of choice seems to be suggestions that the vaccines will alter or damage human DNA.
Snopes recently debunked an anti-vaccine meme going around that claimed the new Pfizer vaccine caused birth defects. The apparent proof of this was that page 132 of the published vaccine study told participants not to have unprotected sex for 28 days after the final dose because the genetic manipulation used to make the vaccine causes birth defects.
That’s not how it f**king works.
According to Snopes, there is no mention of birth defects or genetic manipulation on page 132. In another place in the document, however, there is language suggesting that people who participated in the clinical trial (not people getting the vaccine now) avoid pregnancy for 28 days. This is boilerplate language used in all clinical trials for new pharmaceuticals because the reproductive risks cannot yet be known. It’s not proof of birth defects and it is not about genetic manipulations. It’s standard study speak.
As of now, the CDC believes that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are safe for pregnant women though they have not yet been studied in this population. Go ahead and have sex after your jab if/when you are lucky enough to get it (though you might not feel up to it since the vaccine may have some unpleasant effects, like headache, chills, and soreness at the injection site).
We’ve spent the last 10 months living the grim reality of what happens when just one virus for which there is no vaccine spreads worldwide. I had (perhaps, naively) hoped that this would be enough to change the hearts and minds of vaccine doubters and deniers alike, but alas, misinformation and fear are powerful. Public health experts, communications specialists, educators, and all of us who are praying for herd immunity have a lot of work to do to change minds if we want to get our lives back.
It’s Smart to Use a Condom to Prevent HIV, But It’s Not Necessarily Proof that You Are Smart
The article, “No glove, no love: General intelligence predicts increased likelihood of condom use in response to HIV threat,”originally published in the April 2020 issue of Personality and Individual Difference, may have a clever title but after areader complained that its conclusions were wonky and its references racist, the journal agreed to retract it.
Researchers in Singapore and the U.S. reported the results of two studies designed to test their hypothesis that general intelligence is a predictor of condom usage specifically for HIV prevention, and came to the conclusion that “smarter” people were more open to condoms especially when faced with the “evolutionarily novel STI HIV.”
A reader who wishes to remain anonymous contacted the authors and the journal’s editor noting problems with the data analysis. The authors re-analyzed their data and said they discovered clerical errors in the coding of several scale measures. These errors must have been large enough to skew the conclusions, because both the authors and the editor agreed that the article needed to be retracted.
Moreover, additional review of the study found that it builds on existing research that has biased views of the relationship between race and intelligence. One of the authors relied on in the literature review has argued that sub-Saharan Africa faces high rates of poverty and disease because its population is less intelligent, and another suggested that the biological systems that regulate skin tone might also regulate aggression and sexuality.
How any of these articles survived peer review is beyond me.
In the end, we do not have research telling us that smart people choose condoms. But it’s still smart to choose condoms. So, doesn’t that mean that smart people choose condoms? (If only I knew a professor of symbolic logic. Hey Dad, want to weigh in?)