A World AIDS Day Message on Maternal Child Health & Life

This just in from South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign, or TAC, a grassroots, nonviolent force for justice in the world's most heavily HIV-infected nation and a global inspiration:

As we approach World AIDS Day a key goal must be to improve maternal health and prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT).

On World AIDS Day 1999, I stood with hundreds of other people in Cape Town's Company Gardens for the first unveiling in that city of the AIDS Quilt. We were blessed and moved to hear TAC activists in courageous "I Am HIV Positive" T shirts speak up for their own lives and the lives of all HIV-affected people, and lament those who were already needlessly lost. One of them was a young mother who lost her baby simply because they had been denied access to antiretroviral drugs and other lifesaving care. As she spoke, she made cradling motions in the empty air.

Why should any mother have to suffer like this?
And why, on a related matter, should any pregnant, HIV positive woman anywhere in the world have to face the "choice" between abortion or ELSE?

South Africa's notoriously denialist government was and still is slow to alleviate the crisis all around it. It did not roll out its first PMTCT programs until 2003, and TAC still challenges and challenges it to do right by its own promises to its own citizens, in the area of PMTCT and so much else. 800 human beings still die from HIV/AIDS every day in South Africa. And unfortunately this is but a more dramatic and concentrated example of what is happening in all corners of the planet every day.

Please do not let the sheer numbers numb you out...Each of us has something to give to the struggle against the pandemic. Here are some ways.

--Learn from the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS and endorse its Statement of Support. (The Nonviolent Choice Directory is a proud endorser of this statement.)

--Whether or not you are personally HIV positive, you can check out the Treatment Action Campaign's extensive treatment literacy resources, including a number on mother-to-child transmission. Please consider a gift of time, money, publicity, or expertise to this most necessary organization. ..There are too many ghosts already...