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Do You Tell Your Kids? What Do You Tell Your Kids? When Do You Tell Your Kids? How Do You Tell Your Kids? HIV-Positive Mothers, Disclosure and Stigma

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Women, Motherhood and Living with HIV/AIDS

Abstract

HIV-positive mothers face the complex and challenging decision of whether to disclose their HIV status to their children. Not only do HIV-positive mothers worry about the potential emotional burden this disclosure may impose on their children, but there is also the risk of unwanted disclosure by children and the possibility of ensuing stigma. When thinking about the disclosure of one’s HIV status to another, stigma is implicit. In-depth interviews were conducted in 2001 with 34 HIV-positive women in Australia who were diagnosed during their childbearing years, 28 of whom were mothers. In this chapter, I explore HIV-positive women’s accounts of disclosure and how women construct both public and private accounts of living with HIV as a way of deriving meaning from their diagnosis as well as a way of managing disclosure and its potential ramifications. I also examine the role of stigma in the decisions made about disclosure to children as well as family, friends and broader social networks.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Denise wrote to me 18 months after we met, saying that her daughter now knew her mother and father were HIV-positive. She found out after she saw a newspaper interview that Denise and her partner had done. Denise believed that her daughter was “more upset about being the only one who didn’t know” than about the HIV. Denise also thought that her daughter had “handled it well” and that that could be attributed to her having access to “lots of accurate information” as a result of being around HIV all of her life.

  2. 2.

    Contact-tracing involves partner notification and is the process of identifying the relevant contacts of a person with an infectious disease (such as HIV) to ensure their awareness of their exposure (Donovan et al. 2006: 2). Although the confidentiality of the infected individual is maintained, sometimes it is possible for the individual who is contact-traced to guess her or his identity.

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Acknowledgements

Karalyn would like to sincerely acknowledge the women who generously and courageously shared their accounts. She would also like to thank the National Health and Medical Research Council for her Commonwealth AIDS Related Grant (CARG) Ph.D. Scholarship and Dr Jon Willis, Dr Maggie Kirkman and Professor Doreen Rosenthal for their supervision during the study.

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  1. Department of Infectious Diseases, Monash University, VIC 3004, Melbourne, Australia

    Karalyn McDonald

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Correspondence to Karalyn McDonald .

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  1. School of Public Health, La Trobe University School of Public Health, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia

    Pranee Liamputtong

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McDonald, K. (2013). Do You Tell Your Kids? What Do You Tell Your Kids? When Do You Tell Your Kids? How Do You Tell Your Kids? HIV-Positive Mothers, Disclosure and Stigma. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Women, Motherhood and Living with HIV/AIDS. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5887-2_8

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