AIDS Perspectives
Mother's Work
My mother has been a nurse practitioner for Planned Parenthood for fifteen years. Planned Parenthood is a nation wide organization that offers “a high-quality sexual and reproductive health care, including family planning, gynecological care, STI/STD testing and treatment, pregnancy testing, and abortion services.” (1) She has worked for many sites of Planned Parenthood including Monticello, Goshen, Newburgh, New Windsor, Beacon, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and Middletown. Many of these areas are known as poorer and less affluent areas in the Mid Hudson Region. Ironically, many of these areas that are listed have a considerable high number of cumulative AIDS cases.
Throughout the years, I’ve learned from my mother that Planned Parenthood provides confidential referral, testing, and counseling services for their patients who are enquiring HIV testing. They even provide anonymous testing, which means that a code instead of the clients name is used to record the test results. Although HIV testing is still voluntary, my mom encourages her patients to be tested for it. She advocates HIV testing because it will hopefully change the behavior of the client, and it will lower the risk of others. Also, if people know they have the disease, they can start to take medication that will slow the development of the disease. My mom gave me several pamphlets she gives her patients who are enquiring an HIV test. One of the pamphlets demonstrate that counseling for HIV positive patients consist of transmission reduction, health maintenance, 24 hour coping plan, screening for relationship violence, PNAP, support services, partner testing, and discrimination. I thought since the counseling was so thorough and specific, my mother must have to give counseling for HIV positive patients regularly. This is another reason why I guessed higher.
Also, Planned Parenthood advocates that women color are in the most risk of HIV. Because I didn’t realize the difference between HIV and cumulative AIDS cases, I guessed that there was a significant amount of woman diagnosed with AIDS rather than male. Now I know I was wrong because women of color are indeed in risk of HIV, but cumulative AIDS is a record of all people dying of AIDS.
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