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Joan Scott, Liberalism, and Abortion Rights
Recently, the University of Edinburgh awarded Joan Scott an honorary doctorate in social science. The hooding ceremony seemed more like […]
My Story of 20 Weeks
20 weeks. That is the magic number according to the GOP. House Republicans last week passed a bill, which they […]
100,000 Women in Trafalgar Square: Remembering The Forgotten Women’s March of 1979
On January 21 this year, thousands of people rallied in central London in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington, […]
What Lies Beneath: The Handmaid’s Tale in Trump’s America
I first came across Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale in my junior year of college, when it was assigned […]
#Niunamenos (#Notoneless): Gendered Violence in Latin America
In a July response to a recent series of public protests decrying violence against women, Argentine President Mauricio Macri introduced […]
Tea Kettles and Turpitudes: Abortion and Material Culture in Irish History
In 1932, a Donegal woman was brought up on criminal charges after she attempted miscarriage by consuming both pills as […]
Agency and Abortion in Brazil
Two women’s deaths resulting from clandestine abortions recently shocked the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In August 2014, 27-year-old […]
Positively Negative: Love, Pregnancy, and Science’s Surprising Victory over HIV
By Lara Freidenfelds
What would you do if you desperately wanted to have a baby, and your spouse had HIV? In the mid-1990s, the introduction of highly-effective HIV drug regimens turned HIV from a death sentence into a chronic condition. People with HIV and their life partners could begin to imagine creating families and living to see their children grow up. But it was not until 2014 that researchers and policy-makers approved a prophylactic regimen that effectively protects against HIV-transmission even without condom use. (It still is not officially condoned for family-building purposes, but some physicians are willing to prescribe it for that purpose.) For almost two decades, HIV-discordant couples faced a special kind of infertility: it was childlessness caused by the threat of illness, by fear, and by a traumatized, cautious public health and medical community that could not move beyond its initial message, that “only condoms prevent HIV transmission.”
A new e-book, Positively Negative: Love, Pregnancy, and Science’s Surprising Victory over HIV, takes us into the lives of two couples who lived this history.