In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, obstetrician Robert Barnes, later a founding fellow of the British Gynaecology Society in London, compiled several notebooks on different topics relating to pregnancy and midwifery. One of these books, titled “Abortion”, contains a curious note pasted onto the front page of the book, labelled “coitus as cause of abortion”. On this note, Barnes scribbled:There are no other remarks written around this note, and Barnes did not discuss coitus as a miscarriage cause in the rest of the notebook. He did, however, believe that “passions circulating in motherhood” could be a cause of miscarriage. That Barnes included this snippet about Dionis’s critique of Mauriceau, which we saw in the previous chapter, suggests that the issue of pregnancy sex was not foreclosed by the end of the eighteenth century. While male midwives and medical practitioners increasingly argued in their treatises that sex in pregnancy should be avoided, there were clearly figures who did not think it was a cause of miscarriage. Moreover, Barnes’ references to maternal passions indicates that longings and passion continued to shape how medical knowledge understood the pregnant woman’s mind and body.