Hiv and Pregnancy

Creating life is a beautiful, fulfilling, wonderful experience. They say that a child is a mother’s greatest gift, a mothers missing completion of the world. However, how is a mother to feel when her source of happiness, and her creation is destined to carry out the burden of such mother’s choices? How is a mother to feel knowing that the same creation that she will bring to life she will bring to death? Lisa is a few of the many mothers in this world, found in such a devastating situation, primarily due to the virus HIV/AIDS, but when pregnancy is unexpected, what is mother to do? Give birth to her baby and simply hope it won’t suffer, or is a mother required to accept the presumed evident outcome and abort the baby and save it from suffering? A crucial situation where the past and the present experience have brought about many contradictions to positive and negative actions a mother is to take.

Patti and Chris (1997, pg.79), tell a story about a young girl named Lisa. Lisa was living in Houston after she graduated from high school. She met a guy and they dated for two years. Somewhere along those two years, she took a trip to Greece. While in Greece she became extremely ill and didn’t know the cause of her illness. She went to the hospitals in Greece and Houston, and they simply told her that it was just a virus. After a few months of being home, she became pregnant. Throughout her pregnancy, she was looking and feeling good. It was only after she gave birth that she found out that she was HIV positive. She was tested during her early pregnancy, but her results were negative. It is now 1993 and her son is two weeks old, he seems healthy, but still there is no definite result whether he is positive or negative. However, eight months passed and his symptoms of the infection were developing. Now that Lisa knows that her son Alex is HIV positive she faces reality and starts to look for ways to help her son. Not only did she have to deal with the struggle of her son’s infection, but she had to deal with her own. The worst part of it was moving on without her son when he passed away.

There are many possible outcomes that a woman can take when she is pregnant and infected with HIV/AIDS. She can give birth to her baby or she can abort it. Many women choose to carry on with their pregnancy because the technology today is very advanced. According to Peters V...(Missed opportunities for prenatal HIV prevention among HIV exposed infants born 1996-2000, Pediatric Spectrum of HIV Disease cohort, Pediatrics, 2003;) pregnant women who test, know that they are positive, and take prenatal care, can reduce the transmission to their child. There are also medications that women can take to reduce the risk of transmission. Studies show that the antiviral drug ZDV, has decreased prenatal transmission by 66%. This is encouraging for women who wish to carry out their pregnancy. However, what happens to the remaining outcome? What happens when you to try your best and still your child becomes infected? This questionable doubt leads to the determination a woman makes whether or not to abort. Based on the Berkeley Medical journal (1997), women have an overwhelming issue of dealing with abortion when infected with HIV. It states that nearly 76% of pregnant women with HIV/AIDS got abortions in 1987. These women did not only get abortions because of the lack of scientific evidence on how the virus was transmitted from mother to child back then. They performed abortions for the same reasons that many women infected with the virus do today. It is the fear of the risk of their own health and the additional burdens of having to raise a child infected with HIV. Regardless of the choice that a pregnant woman with HIV/AIDS makes, she has to prepare herself for the aftermath of her decision.

Women who are infected with the virus and are pregnant have to act early on the choices they