Forced abortions and verbal abuse are a regular feature for HIV positive rural women seeking treatment at local government hospitals, claim a group of afflicted women.
NEW DELHI: Forced abortions and verbal abuse are a regular feature for HIV positive rural women seeking treatment at local government hospitals, claim a group of afflicted women.
The women, mainly from southern states like Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, say they face problems when they seek treatment at local hospitals.
"In the entire district of Nalgonda, there is just one Anti-Retroviral Test Centre (ART) AND there is a huge crowd of rural people trying to get their medicines," an HIV positive woman from Andhra Pradesh told reporters here yesterday on the sidelines of a public hearing on AIDS here.
"At some of these centres, women are being made to undergo forced abortions even in advanced stages of pregnancy when the national guidelines issued by National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) clearly state that bearing a child should be entirely the mother's choice," she alleged.
"I had to undergo an appendicitis operation and preferred to get it done at a private hospital instead of a government one as I was not prepared to answer the many questions being asked by the doctors there," said another HIV positive woman from the south.
Apart from this, women also have to face verbal abuse from doctors and para-medical staff at government hospitals, the woman said.
"The situation is so bad that some people prefer to die than go through all that," claimed another woman from the same district.
According to most of these women, it would be much better if the government provided medical facilities to HIV positive people through ART centres.
They also sought better training facilities for nurses and para-medical staff in these centres.
National Commission for Women (NCW) member Malini Bhattacharya, who was present at the meeting, said "the government needs to look into these complaints seriously to provide succour to these women".
There are around 18 million women living with HIV in the world and in India alone, 38 per cent of the 5.1 million affected by HIV are women, according to recent estimates by UNAIDS.
There are nearly 60,000 new infections in India every year.
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