Willingness to have Unprotected Sex‪.‬

Unprotected sex--defined here as heterosexual vaginal intercourse by couples not actively seeking pregnancy and not using a contraceptive method--is poorly understood from a public health perspective. There is little information on the frequency of unprotected sex, who is most at risk, and why couples engage in risky behavior. More easily observable is one of the consequences of unprotected sex--unintended pregnancy. An estimated 3.1 million unintended pregnancies are experienced by women in the United States each year, and just over one half (52%) of these are experienced by women who did not use any method of contraception in the month of conception (Finer & Henshaw, 2006). Assuming a probability of conception per act of unprotected intercourse of 0.03 (Wilcox, Dunson, Weinberg, Trussell, & Baird, 2001), at least 54 million acts of unprotected sex occur in the United States each year.