ABSTRACT
Improved care and information delivery have resulted in increasing numbers of women around the world discovering that they have been infected with HIV, and more women are infected daily. Great variations in how HIV education and HIV antibody testing are administered, the availability of sexual and maternal/child health care, and social attitudes about HIV/AIDS, make it difficult to develop a single prototype program for educating, counseling, or providing medical and support services for HIV seropositive, at-risk or affected women. More fundamentally, cultural differences and the global perception that HIV is linked to socially unacceptable behaviors make women’s routes to discovering and interpreting their serostatus highly variable. Moreover, media coverage of the epidemic in the West has promoted an image of women’s risk that suggests that only extraordinary or deviant women are in danger. Women’s perception of their need for information has been made contingent on understanding themselves as ‘deviant’. However, women frequently recognize their potential for infection only after a male partner has become symptomatic with an HIV-related illness, or when a woman herself seeks perinatal care. Formal and informal processes to inform, support, and care for women with HIV have developed only recently in comparison to those for gay men in North America and Europe.
