Living Stories: Home page

Children

People spoke about how HIV made it difficult or impossible for them to have children. Several people had tried sperm washing and looked into adoption.

Relatives spoke about how they were affected by the absence of children or how losing their loved ones compelled them to have their own children.

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Amanda: Widow of Andrew, who died as a young adult.

We would've tried [sperm washing] again, but I say, the whole thing was really horrid and just after we came back we heard that there was going to be a doctor in England doing it, so I got in touch with him and he said, 'Oh yes, the programme will be going ahead in 12 weeks'. But it never happened because there were problems over the ethics committee or whatever. So it went on for years, at least two years, where they kept saying to us, 'Oh, next six weeks, it's going to happen in six weeks'. It's alright when you're still hoping that, okay, we might just get there in time. But the programme actually got under way just about the time that Andrew died, because I had a letter the day after he died to say we were invited to go along to the clinic. Great timing really.

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Caroline M: Wife of Mick, who was also interviewed.

I remember one of my strongest feelings when I thought he was going to die was I really regretted that we hadn't had a child. And I remember, he's lying in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital when we got back to England, bearing in mind that he still couldn't see and it was still really horrendous. And the first thing I said to him was, 'I want a baby.' And he was like, 'Oh my God! Can I get out of hospital first?' I'm going, 'I want a baby, we've got to find out about sperm washing, I want to find out about it.' And he's like, 'I can't cope with this, I really can't cope with it.' So that kicked it all off then really. And I don't know why, I don't know what it was about. As I say, it was just one of my strongest feelings through the whole thing was that I really regretted the fact that I hadn't got a piece of Mick really.

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Caroline M: Wife of Mick, who was also interviewed.

I don't bang on about it, but in my working life, sometimes people will say, you know, 'Have you got kids?' 'No.' And they'll ask me why I haven't got kids. And I will tell them, it's because my partner's positive. I won't make up a story or lie about it. Because that is why we don't have kids, you know, it's because Mick's got HIV, that's why we don't have kids. And that can be quite difficult for people, but I just think, no, I'm not going to lie and I'm not going to make up a cover story.

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Catherine and Caroline: Sisters of John and James, who both died as young adults.

CATHERINE: I feel pretty definitely that I had Jack as a result of losing John and James, because I had no instinct to have a child up until that point. And it could be argued that I was just at that age anyway, I was thirty-six, thirty-seven, where perhaps the hormones would kick in anyway. But, I think it was a direct result of having to try and find something above and beyond work to live for.

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Diane: Wife of Ian, who is living with haemophilia and HIV.

Diane and Ian tried sperm washing but it didn't work:
It never happened. And I don't actually, I don't blame HIV for it. I think it's one of those things where there was an ambivalence on my part, and maybe on Ian's, and HIV was part of the picture. Ian being HIV positive is not the reason we don't have children. And for both of us it's really important that it doesn't get blamed on the HIV, because that's only part of the picture, it's not the whole one. It's quite sad sometimes at Birchgrove, you look round at this whole generation of really strong women, and lots of them just don't have children. And I'm not the only one who's tried sperm washing, but it just didn't really seem to work for lots of us.

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Heather: Wife of Michael.

I did go through a very, very bad case of wanting to have more children. Where it felt like a real bereavement. That was a really, really strong emotion that lasted a long time. But I got to the stage where I would have to leave the room if a baby was crying or anything like that. At the beginning it was, you're not allowed to ever, ever have unprotected sex, because you will get it and die. I'd known women that that had happened to, they took the risk to get pregnant, got the virus and died. So I knew from experience what would happen. So that was out of the question at that stage.

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Heather: Wife of Michael.

So we looked into the whole fostering and adoption thing, and we had a lovely social worker, she went through it all. And in the end she admitted that it was not going to happen because there was no way that they would place a child in the household where someone's got HIV. And even though there is all these policies that had been written about it, it was just not going to happen in the real world.

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Janet: Mother of Stuart.

He's 32 now. So from going from 14, when he'd got about nine months to live, and going through O-levels and A-levels and university. And me trying to bully him on through all that, and him having to take all his tablets. And now he's going to have a baby. You can't really want for more than that. The fact that he'd be well enough in three months, to have his little boy or little girl, is just fantastic.

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Steve: Nephew of two infected individuals, one alive, one dead. Steve is also the son of Marge.

It affected me because I could have had cousins and people my age. And my grandparents, it affected them, because they would have liked to have grandchildren. Would have been nice to have it.