SEXUAL-BEHAVIOR OF NATURAL FAMILY-PLANNING USERS IN GERMANY AND ITS CHANGES OVER TIME

For 10 years, a prospective study has been taking place in Germany to examine the use of natural family planning (NFP). As natural methods a re behavioral methods, use-effectiveness, acceptability and continuati on rates are very much influenced by patterns of sexual behavior. Ther efore we performed an analysis of the sexual behavior of NFP users. Ou t of the data base of 1211 clients and 21 591 cycles we could identify a group of 300 women, all NFP beginners, with 5900 contraceptive cycl es, who contributed at least 12 cycles with reliable recording of thei r sexual activity. Different groups were analyzed with methods of anal ysis of variance and regression models to find out significant differe nces in their sexual behavior with respect to sociodemographic structu re and time of use. Nearly half of all the women systematically combin e the fertility awareness part of NFP with other family planning metho ds. They use barriers in more than 60% of their cycles. The other half never or only in about 7% of their cycles use additional barrier meth ods. The latter show a clear decrease in barrier use in the course of time, whereas the frequent barrier users constantly combine the advant ages of two family planning methods. Regarding the frequency of interc ourse they are the sexually more active ones and show distinct sociode mographic characteristics. We could confirm the existence of three gro ups of NFP users, which differ significantly in their use of NFP as a family planning method. Despite these differences the low pregnancy ra tes indicate the conscious and risk-related sexual behavior of the gro up members.