LGBT: Full disclosure for HIV+?
An interesting article about a gay medical student from Atlanta who's now being charged with three counts of reckless felony and possibly 10 years in prison for having consensual unprotected sex without informing his partners he's HIV positive. The article definitely brings up a few questions about who should be responsible for the HIV epidemic. Should the government--particularly an openly homophobic one--intervene in such manners? While it is undeniably tragic that this guy infected partners who didn't know he was HIV+, doesn't it take two to engage in consensual unprotected sex? Just as HIV positive individuals should feel responsible for disclosing their status, shouldn't HIV negative persons also be responsible for protecting their health? I don't mean to sound completely insensitive towards the HIV- partners who were deceived and infected, but creating a law requiring HIV+ individuals to disclose their status won't do anything I don't think except encourage HIV- individuals to put the responsibility of their health in other people's hands.
2 comments:
The question is whether or not you want to approach it from a public health standpoint or a justice standpoint. Will jailing HIV positive people who knowingly spread the disease encourage people to get tested and decrease the spread of HIV? No. Although even from a public health perspective, sometimes you have to lockup an individual who refuses to protect those around them (e.g. Typhoid Mary).
Justice: Is it wrong and harmful to knowingly expose someone to a lethal disease when you know that informing them of the risk would change their behavior? Yes. On some level we are all at risk of getting HIV, much like we are all at risk of getting shot by a stray bullet. Going into certain neighborhoods and taking part in risky behaviors (like unprotected sex) might increase the risk, but if this guy were firing random bullets and he hit someone then he would at least be guilty of assault. And that's what he's doing. The fact that he seems to have a pattern of behavior with two guys after the initial incident indicates that this goes way beyond someone in a longterm relationship who just couldn't break the news.
And as homophobic as the government is, as a straight guy I don't really see this as being about homophobia, especially since this is really about one gay man pressing charges against another gay man.
I think that the government's record on matters of HIV+ individuals is really the only thing clouding this argument, although I think I'm on the same page as Zuck. And I fear that pigeonholding this into an LGBT issue seems to thrust us back into the 80's when HIV was a gay disease. I don't think the issue becomes any different when the same logic is applied to a heterosexual partner willingly engaging in unprotected sex without disclosure, and I'm pretty sure heterosexuals have been prosecuted similarly.
Your point about shifting responsibility to others is an interesting one, though I don't fully understand how much it can affect our approach to HIV prevention. Public health is a constant balancing act between individual freedom and public good. I'm not sure there's anyway to publicly affect the behavior of HIV- folks who think they're invincible beyond what years of scare campaign tactics and inaccurate information have already affected.
Post a Comment