Russia is home to one of the fastest-growing AIDS epidemics in the world, but the government has done little to address the problem. A growing number of HIV-positive pregnant women and new mothers must make a very difficult choice: whether or not to keep their children. Shunned by society, these women are vulnerable to discrimination on many fronts: access to health care, employment and education. Many are dependent on drugs and have no access to rehabilitation programs. Still others are living on the brink of poverty. With little or no means to provide for themselves, many find overwhelming the burden of caring for a child to whom the disease may have been transmitted and who would face the same stigma; these mothers may choose instead to abandon their babies.
This report focuses on the care HIV-positive women receive during pregnancy and the fate of their children—those who go home with them as well as those who are abandoned. These are the children who are being placed in specialized orphanages for HIV-positive children or, even worse, warehoused in hospital wards where their only access to the outside world is a nurse in rubber gloves who feeds them. The isolation of these children has nothing to do with medical science and everything to do with discrimination and stigma.
