I don't know, I could see this being the response up to the mid-late '80s - it didn't really hit mainstream zeitgeist until Rock Hudson in '85, the official "first case in a woman" was '84, condoms didn't really take off outside high-risk communities until the early 90s, and Abby was probably not at the vanguard of all that. Obviously it *should* have been in the forefront by the early eighties, but I remember it still being treated as a new thing in the early-mid-90s.