Thinking about pregnancy

With good medical care and HIV treatment, HIV-positive women can give birth to children without passing on HIV.

If precautions aren’t taken, there is a risk of a mother passing HIV on to her baby in the womb, when the baby is being born or during breastfeeding.

But many women with HIV have given birth to HIV-negative children. With the right treatment and care, only one baby in 1000 is likely to be born with HIV.

If you’re thinking about having a baby, but aren’t pregnant yet, it’s important to talk to your doctor first, so that he or she can check if you are in good enough health to have a baby safely. Staff at your HIV clinic can also tell you about how to get pregnant without putting your partner at risk of infection or reinfection.

It’s worth telling your HIV doctor or nurse that you’d like to try to become pregnant to get the best advice: 

• Pregnancy will be easier if HIV is not causing serious health problems at the moment.
• If you have a sexually transmitted infection, or any other infection, you need to wait until it has been treated
• There are ways to get pregnant that limit the risk of passing HIV onto your partner, if he is HIV negative.
• It is important to follow the advice for all women who are planning pregnancy. This includes stopping smoking, eating healthily, avoiding alcohol, taking care over food poisoning and taking folic acid supplements
• There are some anti-HIV drugs which you may want to avoid during pregnancy – your doctor can tell you if it would be safer to change your treatment. However, these are drugs that are very rarely used in the UK now, and the chances are you won’t have to change your treatment.

Some women find it difficult to become pregnant, and there can be medical reasons for this. If you are not pregnant after six months of trying, go back to the doctor. There may be tests and treatment that could help.