AIDS Victims

[Guest guest]

And what about the girls or women who got AIDS through rape? Are they

responsible?

I'm on Lynn's side all the way!

Judith Alta

-----Original Message-----

From: Lynn Siprelle [mailto:lynn@...]

> How does the victim bear no responsibility for AIDS?

OK, , you hit my hot button. I was a volunteer at our local AIDS

project for nearly four years (until I burned out). Blaming the

infected may make uninfected folks feel all smug and happy about how

morally superior they are, but they're wrong.

In the US, AIDS has historically been a gay male issue, and some folks

can contend if they wish that unsafe sex caused it so they should live

with it (personally, having worked with people with AIDS, I would never

be so coldhearted). Internationally this is not at all the case. And

even in the US it's not always the case.

An entire generation of hemophiliacs, thousands of people, who would

otherwise have lived even with their underlying condition, has been

wiped out by AIDS. These men were sons, brothers, husbands, fathers.

(And before you get all huffy about passing on inferior genes,

hemophilia is not passed on by hemophiliacs.)

What about children who receive it from mothers in utero? Spouses who

receive it from allegedly faithful or non-drug-abusing partners? These

are not rare statistics, these are real people, and internationally

they're a large chunk of AIDS cases.

The client I worked with had hemophilia and contracted AIDS, like many

hemophiliacs, through tainted blood products in the early '80s. He

lived with AIDS for 15 years before dying; he fought so hard I thought

he'd live forever, but he didn't. He was a year younger than me, and

I'm now 42. When you make statements like that, I see Larkey's face,

and then everything gets blurry because I start crying. And then I get

mad. And when I'm mad, I'm not very polite.

Rethink your position, . You are dead wrong.

Lynn S.