"Just the opposite has happened," Mayersohn says. After a three-year fight, her bill passed in 1996. It revolutionized public health in New York. "The way they used to do counseling," she says, "they told women, if you get tested and test positive, you will lose your home and lose your job. After the law passed, they told women, your baby is going to get tested anyway, so if you get tested now, you can do something to keep your baby from being born HIV-positive."
More mothers and babies now get care. An HIV-positive mother has roughly a 25 percent chance of delivering a baby infected with HIV. If she takes the right drugs during pregnancy she can drastically diminish those odds. An HIV-positive mother can also pass the infection to her uninfected baby during breast-feeding. If she knows she's infected, she can avoid that. Finally, if a baby is infected with HIV, he can be treated early with drugs that might wipe out the infection.
Then-Rep., now Sen. Tom Coburn pushed legislation similar to Mayersohn's at the federal level in the 1990s, but was frustrated by the same forces that opposed Mayersohn. Consequentially, the testing policy varies from state to state. Nationally, the rate of infants infected with HIV has declined, but it has not been stamped out. California -- where lunatic obsessions still reign supreme -- has resolutely resisted the New York approach. In 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that cases of HIV among children were actually increasing.
So let's ask one more time: Do we want healthy babies or not?