Week 3

I had no idea what I was going to blog about this week until I had answered my Question of The Week. When asking my husband, Brett, how he would handle it if I were to have HIV or AIDS, his first response would be that we would have to adopt if we wanted to have children. This small response got me thinking about such a larger picture than I expected. I thought about how everyone who contracts HIV has to decide whether or not to even initially tell their sexual partners if they have the virus/AIDS. Then, they have to decide eventually what they will do to protect their partners. Eventually, this decision making process may trickle down to deciding whether or not to have children together.

I can’t speak for anyone else but myself in saying that it would not be easy to just automatically say, “You’re right Brett. Let’s not have our own children. Let’s adopt.” It would be really depressing, but I also can’t see me wanting to spread HIV to another soul if I had the power in my own hands. From an outsider’s look, it is painless to say, “People with HIV shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce offspring.” It takes a bigger person to look at these individuals and to at least try to understand where they are coming from before slamming the door on their behavior.  

There’s a side of me that wants to say, “Just because someone has HIV, doesn’t mean that their own free rights should be taken away.” The other side of me says, “Look at the baby involved, and what about their rights as to living an HIV-free life?” Maybe I am just too uneducated about HIV to even take a side in this matter. So far in this class, I really only thought about how HIV affects people who do not have HIV, but this small topic has open my eyes to see that there are many other things that a person with HIV definitely has to think about. This topic has showed me how HIV affects a person’s whole life, not just their body.

The Question of the Week also had me thinking about if the tables were flipped, and my husband was to be the one with the virus. I would feel as if there was a huge wall right, smack in the middle of our relationship. Ultimately, the decisions should be made by the person with HIV. It isn’t my business or anyone else’s what they decide to do. I am just wondering what everyone else thinks.

Did You Know?

Among the children who have HIV, almost sixty two percent of them are not receiving the proper treatment in order to prolong their lives. One reason for this is because children usually need to take their medication in the form of syrup or powders because they find tablets hard to swallow. Caretakers are giving children adult tablets broken into pieces, causing them to not get the necessary amount. Two other reasons are that “medication is high in cost, and that there is a lack of healthcare works trained to treat children.” (Avert, 2010)

Resource:

Avert. (July, 2010) “HIV, AIDS, and Children.” Retrieved on September 15, 2010 from http://www.avert.org/children.htm.