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Protecting your own and other people's health
It’s a pretty obvious point, but one worth making nevertheless: HIV can be passed on to another person during sex.
Each individual needs to make their own decisions about the steps they are willing to take (and practically can take) to prevent them passing on HIV to another person.
Ultimately, it’s a personal decision, which is likely to be influenced by a whole host of individual circumstances.
Nevertheless, it’s important to be aware that if you have unprotected sex with a person who is HIV-negative (whether you know this or not), and they are infected with HIV by you, there could be serious legal consequences. In both England and Scotland HIV-positive men have been jailed after failing to tell their female sex partners they were HIV-positive and infecting them with HIV. This issue is looked at in more detail in the section on the law and HIV. In some other countries, most notably some states of the USA, it is a crime for an HIV-positive individual to have sex with another person without disclosing their HIV status.
There are other factors which you might also wish to have in mind when making decisions about sex. Unprotected sex carries the risk of acquiring sexually transmitted infections, which can be unpleasant. The viruses hepatitis B and hepatitis C can be sexually transmitted and can have very serious health consequences. Pregnancy is another obvious risk for women of child-bearing age. There’s also some evidence that people with HIV can in some circumstances be reinfected with another strain of HIV which might be more difficult to treat.
These issues are considered in more detail below.