Yes, HIV-Positive Men Can Become Fathers. Here's Two Providers Who Help Them

published on June 15, 2018 by Kenyon Farrow, in The Body

In HIV, we pay a lot of attention to parenthood -- but mostly from the perspective of ending mother-to-child transmission. Even then, the public health message is often mostly about the baby, not the health and well-being of the mother.

But almost nowhere do we have deep discussions about reproductive options for HIV-positive men, particularly cisgender straight men. In honor of Father's Day, we sat down with Shannon Weber, M.S.W., executive director of HIVE and Guy Vandenberg, M.S.W., RN, with the Positive Reproduction Options for Men (PRO Men) project of HIVE and Ward 86 in San Francisco.

I also held a Facebook Live conversation with Weber and Vandenberg, which you can watch, as well as read the longer interview below.

Kenyon Farrow: Thank you guys so much, one, for reaching out to us to have this conversation and, two, for participating today.

So, my first question is, how was HIVE started?

Shannon Weber: OK, great. So, I'm the director of HIVE. HIVE, for a long time -- in fact, since 1989 -- cared for women living with HIV around pregnancy. And probably in the mid-2000s, that expanded briefly to start caring for HIV-negative women. And in 2010, we began offering PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis] to women in and around pregnancy.

And so, as we began to see more sero-discordant couples, or HIV-negative women, we had these questions. You know, where are the men? Women get pregnant and they get HIV generally from the same activity. And, really, we weren't sure where the men were and what kind of services they were receiving.

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Yes, HIV-Positive Men Can Become Fathers. Here's Two Providers Who Help Them

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