Illinois legislators approve bill that would decriminalize HIV transmission
chicagotribune.com
chicagotribune.com
I find it’s terrifying. I think if you don’t know that you have HIV and in advertently transmit it to a partner, you should not be held responsible. That’s a double edge sword I understand, but if you know you have HIV, and you knowingly transmit it to another individual without telling them, I think that is a criminal act.
It's very easy to protect yourself from sex with people who may be HIV-positive. Don't have sex with them or use condoms.
Edit: grammar
Not having sex with them is fine whether you know it or not. Sex is always a risk.
> What this legislation seeks to do is to remove criminal liability for someone who knowingly transmit HIV without telling their partner.
You should read the article before arguing about it. Here is the first sentence:
> "The Illinois Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would repeal a law that left HIV-positive people open to felony charges for failing to disclose their health status to partners before unprotected sex."
Note that the law criminalizes failing to disclose HIV status, not "transmitting HIV" (which is highly unlikely even for unprotected anal sex, and essentially impossible if using a condom).
> If you have HIV and you don’t tell your partner, how are they able to make the decision not to have sex with you?
The same way people decide whether to have sex with any stranger. There are three options:
A) Take the risk. You are fully informed of the risks of having sex with strangers. It is your choice. It's not like the HIV+ person is making a decision for you.
B) Use a condom.
C) Choose not to have sex with someone until you're confident that they have no sexually-transmissible infections.
The government shouldn't force people to disclose extremely sensitive medical information in any situation.
An ethical puzzle. Modern antiviral treatment, when adhered to and effective (efficacy can be shown reliably with blood tests), makes an HIV+ person practically non-infectious. How non-infectious? It's hard to calculate it's so low. But it's very likely not literally 0. Very slightly above. At what point can we treat ~0 risk to be 0 risk, for ethical, and legal purposes?
If we conclude that it is unethical at that small but not demonstrably zero rate, then -- is attempted murder or some other homicide-like law the right one? Assault?
And if we deem it is immoral to take that kind of risk with someone else's life, is there an analogy to drawn to maybe something like if you drive a vehicle that releases a pollutant into the air that causes lung cancer... should that be a crime?
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You can wrestle with the tangents this gives you for a long time. There are whole books about the bioethics of this. But I cut out of the paper bag at this point.
None of this really matters re: HIV, though it sure is interesting for a philosophy course. Most HIV transmissions occur by people who don't know they have it. Most of the infections occur in people who wouldn't report it. Most of the allegations do not result in a successful and provable prosecution because it's a classic "he said he said" rape case otherwise.
What a remarkable waste of resources, just arguing about this law for or against itself, when we have millions of people in this world who are HIV+ and who cannot afford medicine.
HIV, like diffuse pollution, is a collective action problem and should not be viewed /primarily/ through an individual lens that we can do anything about meaningfully by sporadically targeting a small proportion of the total perceived wrongdoers.
Of course, most of us do think that people with malice should be prosecuted for their malevolence against their fellow man. But this is not really relevant to /public health/ beyond the threshold of noise.
Pollution's effects destroy us as a society as its level rises. The viral load concentration of HIV in humanity's collective ocean of blood is no different. Just target that number and bring it down. Everything else is losing the forest for the trees.
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People are so heated on this that while they are arguing with conviction, they have no capacity to reason while doing so. For example, Illinois's ACLU statement on this, is just horrible logical fallacies -- take this gem:
> The current discriminatory Illinois law: Makes otherwise legal behavior – like consensual sex – illegal.
("The law against murder otherwise makes legal behaviour -- like exercising vigorously while holding a knife -- illegal.") This is one of the oldest lawyer jokes in the world, and they used it.
Well maybe you were cheering so far but... let's have a look at someone else. The ones everyone loves to hate. Heterosexual white suburban American men -- you know, the people who are an order of magnitude less HIV risk than anyone else in the USA. Well, these guys are quite deeply frightened for themselves. Contamination nation is our destination. Though even the most catastrophic numbers you care to estimate as consequences to decent straight men for this law, would be reduced to a drop in the ocean of loss for their kind, with a bad tornado in Oklahoma.
The stakes are not in proportion to people's zeal. Any which way. Yes, the law likely has a negative discriminatory impact that is paradoxically fuelling the HIV epidemic a bit. But it is not quite perpetuating the mass death of gay men and trans folk. The law may well result in a handful of cases over the decades where a psychopathic person gets to wriggle out because they can't satisfactory prove intent to transmit where the previous simple fact of the act would have sufficed. Either way it does not really matter to any big picture.
I have no idea why I wrote this, really. I started typing and could not stop. Hope it provokes in a good way.