Paper short abstract:

Despite developments in HIV research, people living with HIV face challenges navigating reproduction and parenting. Through a lens of reproductive governance, this work focuses on people living with HIV Ireland and how laws, policy, practices and public attitudes stratify these parents from others.

Paper long abstract:

Substantial developments in effective viral suppression and understandings of HIV change the way people live with HIV, and explore possibilities in having children. Despite 20 years of biomedical evidence verifying the untransmissibility of HIV for those with access to antiretrovirals, policies, laws, practices and public attitudes towards parents/prospective parents living with HIV remain at odds. Using ethnographic methods, I give voice to a seldomly represented group: parents and prospective parents living with HIV in Ireland.

Through a lens of reproductive governance, I explore how living with HIV, as well as laws, policies and practices stratify these parents from others, affect their imaginations of the future, and put some in a position of reproductive exile. With a focus on (in)access to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) for people living with HIV in Ireland, I explore how they are particularly stratified and disempowered from achieving their reproductive desires. Contradictions between biomedical evidence with policies, laws, practices and public attitude may even exclude them from parenthood altogether. This is particularly relevant to PLWHIV facing infertility and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community, for whom ARTs often play a key role in one’s reproductive journey.

With this work I advocate for better collaboration of those in biomedicine and social science with those in law and policy making, to ensure practices and lived realities reflect up-to-date evidence, and are informed by intersectional approaches. This is a crucial step in the striving for reproductive justice for PLWHIV in Ireland and greater Europe.