'Do Not Become Pregnant': Negotiating HIV-Affected Pregnancy and Abortion in Late-Twentieth-Century Scotland.

Abstract

This article tracks how the advice to terminate pregnancies became integral to the medical and social management of HIV among women in the UK, and considers how this shaped women's experiences of HIV-affected pregnancy. Specifically, it traces how the advice that 'at risk' and HIV positive women should avoid pregnancy, and should terminate pregnancies, evolved in the last decades of the twentieth century. It asks how this advice shaped the experiences of pregnant people affected by HIV, and then finally traces how the advice to terminate pregnancies ebbed away. In doing so, the article explores how healthcare practitioners and the women under their care viewed HIV-affected pregnancy, and the possibilities of HIV-affected motherhood and natal families it conjured, excavating the myriad tensions which shaped the decision to terminate or continue a pregnancy affected by HIV.