Family Planning Counseling for Women Living with HIV

Family Planning (FP) Counseling occurs when health care providers inform clients about their family planning options and help them make informed decisions regarding their reproductive wants and needs. Women who are living with HIV, like all women, have reproductive rights. As stipulated in the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, all women, in equality with men, have “rights to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children and to have access to the information, education and means to enable them to exercise these rights.”1 In many cases, women living with HIV desire additional pregnancies and should be assisted to conceive, carry a pregnancy to term, deliver, and care for the resulting child safely. However, in other cases, women living with HIV become pregnant despite not desiring a pregnancy. Globally, many women lack access to FP information and modern contraceptive methods; as a result, many pregnancies are unintended. In countries with the highest HIV burden, it is estimated that unintended pregnancies account for 14-58% of all births, and rates of unintended pregnancy among women living with HIV are high.2 Preventing unintended pregnancies by providing FP counseling to women living with HIV could lead to significant decreases in mother-to-child transmission of HIV. One costeffectiveness study found that moderate decreases in the number of unwanted pregnancies among women living with HIV could avert as many newborn HIV infections as antiretroviral drugs.3