Many HIV-Positive Adults Want Children: Survey

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Nearly one third of HIV (news - web sites)-positive Americans report a desire to have children in the future but fewer expect that they actually will, results of a survey show.

The nationwide survey of more than 1,400 HIV-infected adults conducted in 1998 found that 28% of men and 29% of women who were getting medical care want to have children. Many of these individuals--69% of women and 59% of men--expect to have at least one child.

The rest, however, do not expect that they will ever fulfill their wish, according to findings published in the July/August issue of Family Planning Perspectives, a journal of The Alan Guttmacher Institute.

Still, the results underscore the need to prevent transmission of the disease from mother to child and between heterosexual partners, note Dr. James L. Chen and co-authors. Chen was at the University of California, San Francisco, at the time of the survey, and is currently with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services.

While better drugs have reduced the rate of HIV transmission from mother to child to about 2%, maternal transmission still accounts for the majority of new HIV infections in children, the investigators point out.

``The fact that many HIV-infected adults desire and expect to have children has important implications for the prevention of vertical (mother-to-child) and heterosexual transmission of HIV, the need for counseling to facilitate informed decision-making about childbearing and childrearing, and the future demand for social services for children born to infected parents,'' Chen and colleagues write.

Children of HIV-infected parents will need support to plan for a life in which both parents are sick, including counseling to cope with the stigma attached to having HIV-positive parents, the authors explain.

The study also found that younger and more physically vital individuals were more likely to desire children. Although women who wanted children were more likely to be married or to have a partner, men who wanted children were no more likely to have an opposite-sex partner than men who did not desire children.

Black men and women were also more likely than those of other races to expect to have children. Men in general were less likely to expect children but when they did, they were more likely to expect to have at least two children, the researchers note.

SOURCE: Family Planning Perspectives 2001;33:144-152.