Understanding positive women's realities

Making the sexual rights of women living with HIV count

By: Bell E & Orza L
Published in:Exchange on HIV/AIDS, Sexuality and Gender, Autum 2006
Via: Eldis

This issue of Exchange, produced in association with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW), focuses on the experience of women living with HIV. The issue focuses particularly on sexual and reproductive rights. It shows how the ABC (Abstain; Be Faithful; Use Condoms) approach, currently favoured by funding bodies such as USAID, ignores the complexity of human needs and desires. There is also a report from India on women who have lost their land due to their HIV status, and a report from Uganda on the ’memory work’ project in which mothers living with HIV and their children have been involved. Despite a growing recognition of the rights of women living with HIV to healthy and fulfilling sexual lives and reproductive choices, there remain many obstacles to women exercising those rights. Women living with HIV have to balance their fears of rejection, abandonment and violence from partners with their need for intimacy and their desire to have children. They also frequently face harsh judgements from health workers about their rights to have sex and children. This includes examples of access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) for women being tied into the use of certain types of contraception. The authors recommend that testing, and other HIV services, be carried out in a sexual rights framework that provides women with the support to deal with these complex issues. They also urge that the voices of women living with HIV be meaningfully included in all HIV policy and programme development.