In the battle for reproductive health, Hartford needs more weapons.

According to the state Department of Public Health, Hartford has the highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS of any city in the state. The number of Hartford's teen pregnancies consistently outflanks the statewide average.

The city's Institute for Community Research just received a four-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to promote pregnancy and HIV prevention by increasing the availability of the female condom, especially among at-risk women and their partners.

The female condom offers a safe and easy means of birth control that is woman-controlled. If a male partner can't or won't use a male condom, then the woman has the option to protect herself from a pregnancy she doesn't want, or from sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

And so the woman gains some control over her reproductive destiny, but first? The institute's executive director Margaret R. Weeks says consumers must overcome their initial unease about the 15-year-old product.

The female condom the institute will study is an open-ended pouch that is larger than a male condom. It's inserted inside the woman; one end fits over the cervix (like a diaphragm); the other hangs outside the body to form a protective shield during sex. It is — as is the male condom — to be used once and then thrown away.

Despite its simplicity, female condoms haven't been popular. They can cost four times (on average $2.50 to $3 per condom) that of a male condom, and that's if you can find one. Weeks said some local Rite Aid pharmacies carry them, but other pharmacies insist they typically sit on the shelf until they expire, so they don't stock them. Reproductive health-care providers don't talk about the condoms often, so this method of sexual protection hasn't gained much traction in the marketplace.

Yet if more health providers would promote them, more pharmacies would stock them, so more people would buy them, and that would increase the likelihood the condoms would be mass-produced, which would bring down the price, says Weeks.

Weeks says she wasn't a fan of female condoms until she saw women in very different circumstances and at various education levels and ages respond favorably to the product.

Now, she's an advocate. "We need as many options as are available," she said.

This seems especially important now. In all the talk since the May 31 murder of abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kan., we haven't said much about birth control.

But if we're going to limit the number of abortions in this country — one idea on which both sides can agree — we need to talk about how best to limit unintended pregnancies. This past week, Tiller's family decided to permanently close his Wichita clinic. That's one way to limit abortions we know about, but that's not going to limit abortions. Restricting legal and safe abortions will only push them back to the danger of the back alleys.

We can, as some pro-life protagonists insist, limit pregnancies by encouraging abstinence from sex, but just try getting the cork back in that bottle. Instead, let's freely and openly discuss birth control that works: male condoms, the pill, female condoms, all of it.