AIDS Found Altering Single Women’s Sex

Nearly one-third of all sexually experienced single women in the United States have changed their sexual behavior because they are worried about AIDS, federal health officials reported Tuesday.

“It is encouraging that a substantial number of unmarried women at higher risk recognize the dangers of HIV infection and have taken positive steps to lessen that risk,” said Dr. William Roper, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control. “Education and prevention are still our most powerful weapons in the fight against AIDS.”

The study, conducted by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, showed that 31% of unmarried women who have had intercourse said they have made one or more changes in their sexual practices, such as restricting their sexual activity to one partner or only to men they know well. The findings indicated that such changes are widespread, and “AIDS appears to be one central reason for it,” said William Mosher, a co-author of the study.

But the questions about AIDS--which were included for the first time in the center’s survey on reproduction issues--did not address condom use, which had appeared on a previous survey, Mosher said.

Past surveys have shown that the number of unmarried women using condoms has increased in recent years, Mosher said. Had a question about condoms and AIDS been asked in the most recent survey, the number of women who had changed their behavior because of AIDS presumably would have been even higher.

Among unmarried women who had 10 or more sexual partners in their lives, 50% of them had changed their sexual behavior, the report said. Also, 34% of women with five to nine partners and 26% of women with two to four partners reported similar changes.

The report said that 5.5% of all unmarried women had stopped having intercourse, while 5% of those with 10 or more partners had stopped. The study said that 9.3% of unmarried women overall had reduced their frequency of sex, while 16.2% of women with 10 or more partners had done so.

Sally Jue, a clinical social worker who is the mental health program manager at AIDS Project Los Angeles, said she found the statistics “less encouraging than they seem on the surface.”

“I’ve run into it often enough: a lot of women who thought they knew their partners well who found out after they became infected, or after they developed symptoms of AIDS, that their partners had engaged in a high risk-behavior,” she said.

Some 4,400 unmarried women across the nation--including never married, widow and divorced--were interviewed in their homes from January to August in 1988.