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Becoming positively human
It’s time the government stopped discriminating against women in HIV screening policies, says Alice Welbourn
I have probably had HIV for 19 years. Until I was diagnosed, when happily pregnant in 1992, I was blissfully unaware of this bug I have in my body. That’s the same for 1/3 of all the 70,000 people with HIV in the UK – they have no idea that they have it because they are probably fit and well and totally unaware of the timebomb ticking away inside them. The only outward signs of my damaged immune system were three shingles attacks, which responded quickly to treatment, during the late nineties. Even eight years ago, in March 2000, when I had to start taking anti-retroviral drugs religiously for the
rest of my life, I swam 2.5 kilometres easily for Shelter without any need to train.
Nowadays, we hear little about HIV in Britain because people assume that, since the life-saving drugs arrived in the mid 90s, it’s been cured. Wrong.
Clinically, HIV may be a long-term condition rather than a death sentence, but many – not me luckily – still have nasty on-going side-effects from the strong drugs. With the right medical attention during pregnancy, there is now under two per cent chance of parents passing HIV to their baby. So, many healthy children have been born. But discrimination against us all is still high, which is why we keep so quiet about it. In the UK, 60 per cent of new diagnoses are now heterosexually acquired. New diagnoses doubled between 2000 and 2005. Women account now for over 40 per cent of these. All shocking figures but unsurprising, given Britain’s overall lack of information or support around sexual health. Our children still have scandalously inadequate sex, relationships, alcohol and other drugs education in school, as recent reports from Girl Guides, the Red Cross and the YWCA testify.
This year marks 60 years since the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The Elders, including Mary Robinson and Nelson Mandela, are highlighting different themes. The March theme is that “every woman has human rights”. Globally, women especially face discrimination when they test positive. As in the UK, there is a global “slag” vs “stag” attitude around sex. Women are targeted by health ministries for HIV testing during pregnancy, to avoid transmission to their babies. Great in principle, but since women are often the first in a family to get tested, they are frequently attacked on the – usually false – assumption that they must have been cheating. (UNAIDS says that married women are more vulnerable to HIV than single women.)
So if you want to have a child, please go with your partner to be tested together, before conceiving. Then, you can still have healthy children, but can avoid the shock of diagnosis during pregnancy. Just imagine, wouldn’t it be great for our government to uphold women’s rights in relation to HIV this year and change its HIV testing policy away from targeting pregnant women. Wouldn’t it be great if all of us upheld HIV positive people’s rights this year and changed our attitudes towards yet another disability which has deeply touched so many.
www.EveryHumanhasRights.org (people can sign the UN declaration for themselves on this website)