This paper presents the findings of a 6-month clinical trial of female condom conducted at nine sites: three in Latin America and six in the US concerning its efficacy safety and acceptability. 377 nonpregnant women between the ages of 18 and 40 who were in an ongoing mutually monogamous heterosexual relationship and had been using a female condom for 6 months were enrolled in the trial. Evaluation of the methods safety was based on the experience of 359 participants while the contraceptive efficacy evaluation was based on 328 women. Overall findings revealed that Latin American women who used the method consistently and correctly experienced a 6-month accidental pregnancy rate of about 10 pregnancies per 100 users while US women had a rate of fewer than 3 per 100. Overall failure rates were substantially higher: 22 failures per 100 Latin American women and 12 per 100 US women. There were no reports of sexually transmitted diseases or serious unexpected or life-threatening experiences related to female condom use. Moreover there is no evidence that use of the method increases womens risk of cervical changes. In the context of the methods acceptability more than 80% said that they liked using the method and would recommend it to others. The researchers acknowledged that since their study did not compare the female condom with some other method it was not possible to make absolute statements about the methods efficacy.