Double infection: HIV and conservative ideology

Suddenly we are jolted out of our comfort zone. We ask questions.

 

Sketchily, a few facts emerge. Cabinet has proposed mandatory testing for pregnant women, sex workers and sex offenders. Not for their husbands, boyfriends or clients, though. Do women get pregnant through Immaculate Conception? The gender activists in the room point out that such testing is discriminatory.

 

Parliament has not debated the measure yet, but JournAIDS is advocating for it. Why? “We have to save these women and their babies. Some men will not allow their wives to test, we must make it clear that men are not important, women and babies are.”

 

The Madonna effect! …and I am not talking about celebrity adoption by the Material Girl. This is seeing women as wombs, in the glory of our reproductive role alone. Women isolated from their social lives, their circumstances, their families, their men.

 

Some contrast. In the room next door, someone is presenting The Fatherhood Project to help men be better parents. In this room, men are positioned as irrelevant.

 

Next: “Due to cultural factors, our people only react to the law. If there is a law, they will test. We are proud to defend the lives of pregnant women and their babies.”

 

Save their lives…even at the expense of their human rights?

 

What worries me is not the diverging opinions. This is welcome. If we don’t hear, we cannot argue. If we don’t argue, we don’t learn. Before this session, we were preaching to the converted. Now we are trying to convert the preacher. Viva diversity.

 

What also worries me is the intersection of morality with public health, old fashioned values that smack of the religious right taking advantage of the epidemic to re-position and advance, coupled with the underlying view that Africans are stupid. They don’t make the right health decisions unless they are ordered (mandatory testing), or bribed (as in the World Bank project in southern Tanzania that plans to pay US$50 a year to young adults aged 18-35 if they remain HIV-free.).

 

There are plenty of reasons why people don’t test – yet testing has grown by leaps and bounds in Malawi once antiretroviral treatment became available. In 2006 alone, 661,000 people tested for HIV, and 482,400 the previous year. Some 140,000 are on ARVS now – quite impressive for one of the world’s poorest countries, with 13 million people and a seroprevalence rate of 12 per cent, slowly declining.

 

The same government report (prepared for UNGASS 2008) says that 60 sites offer prevention of mother- to-child transmission, equivalent to 10 percent of all antenatal clinics. So mandatory testing will not help those pregnant women who live far away from the 60 sites or the estimated 40 percent who never reach an antenatal clinic.

 

Making testing mandatory may push pregnant women away from the clinics. What is needed are more entry points for citizens into a user-friendly health system, not fewer.

 

As journalists, we need to interrogate figures, facts and opinions. As activists, we need to interrogate agendas. Because, creeping in with the virus, comes ideology, hand in hand with funding. The title of this Summit is ever so relevant: “Whose news, whose views? Critical consumers, responsive media.”

Mercedes Sayagues is a South Africa-based writer. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.