Baby AIDS

This is peculiar. It seems somebody has sabotaged the AIDS early detection program that focuses on getting treatment for babies.

States that have already implemented HIV testing and treatment for susceptible infants have seen their infections rates drop dramatically. Such success even inspired Congress to pass a law this past December which created the Ryan White Early Diagnosis Grant Program. The program authorized $30 million in funding to states with infant HIV testing in order to ensure that these vulnerable children are protected from contracting the deadly virus.

But someone wants to put a stop to the program.

Although it was created only two months ago, language was recently added to the current appropriations bill to prohibit funding for this “Baby Aids” program. Section 20613(b) of H.J.Res. 20 states:

(b) None of the funds appropriated by this division may be used to: (1) implement section 2625 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 300ff-33; relating to the Ryan White early diagnosis grant program)…

To be clear, this additional language does not save money; it simply prohibits the money that was authorized from being spent on the program.

Apparently the funding was already in place, but now it's been diverted.

I didn't understand why anyone would want to undermine this program--doesn't everyone want to stop AIDS?--so I did a little background checking and discovered that some people think that testing and treating at-risk infants is an invasion of the mother's privacy. And maybe it is.

Now, I'm a mother--but it sure seems that mothers are becoming a weirdly privileged group. When our children are in utero we can kill them, and after they're born we can prevent them from receiving life-saving medical treatments.

Others object to the Ryan White Early Diagnosis program because testing babies would "reduce the amount of funds available to the CDC for HIV/AIDS prevention and produce a detrimental effect on local public health prevention efforts that are already underfunded."

Okay, that's fair enough: Funding an additional program would mean less money for other programs. But as best as I can tell, the existing programs focus on adults, most of whom have contracted the disease by way of choices they made. Don't think me unsympathetic; I had a friend who died of AIDS. But adults are paying for their own bad decisions, whereas infants are paying for bad decisions their parents made.

This topic is fairly byzantine--one commentor over at Joe's is arguing that this isn't even about baby AIDS, but is rather about appropriations protocol; another is saying pre-natal testing could lead to more abortions--so I'm still thinking the whole thing over.

It's so hard to know how best to protect the helpless.