Disclosing HIV

Disclose, reveal, tell the truth, inform a sex partner to enable him/her to make a choice representative of true consensual agreement.  Or, simply put, face the consequences.  Surely that is more than fair and just.  After all, if ignorance of the facts and the potential for complicating one's life through trust of one's fellow man might cause harm to the individual without full knowledge it should be incumbent upon the individual harbouring a dread disease to divulge that fact.

Rather than compromise the health and security of another human being.  In the event that the individual who has HIV believes themselves to have a low viral load not likely to communicate to another person, does that still take them off the hook of moral responsibility?  Those in that position believe that to be the case.  Others, not so much.  The instances where people with AIDS have gone on to infect others by not disclosing the truth represents one too many cases of wilful neglect causing great harm.

The Supreme Court of Canada has brought down its decision, and it does compromise to a degree.  Having ruled that an individual living with the virus does not necessarily legally have to disclose their health status to a sex partner if a condom is being used and they have what is termed 'low viral loads'.  Not for them, evidently, to rule on the morality of permitting a sex partner to assume that all is well and no danger attaches to sex with someone who seems fine. 

Deception in love and war and politics take place all the time.  Usually the law does not abet deception.  On the other hand, it is said by those for whom the matter holds great moment, that the scientific medical community feel fairly assured about the lowered incidences of communicability of the disease under certain circumstances.  A matter that should surely be left to the personal discretion of a fully informed sex partner, as a courtesy at the very least, so that the sex act between two people is truly 'consensual' in nature.

"However, on the evidence before us, the ultimate percentage risk of transmission resulting from the combined effect of condom use and low viral load is clearly extremely low - so low that the risk is reduced to a speculative possibility rather than a realistic possibility." 
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin

On the positive side the court reinstated three convictions against Clato Lual Mabior, a former resident of Winnipeg who served a jail sentence and was deported to his native South Sudan subsequently.  This man was convicted in 2008 for failing to disclose his HIV-positive state to no fewer than nine women he had sex with.  He also had sex with a 12-year-old girl.  He had been convicted on six counts of aggravated sexual assault and served nine years in prison.

So then, outside the limits of low viral loads and condom use, the ruling holds that for any "realistic possibility of transmission of HIV" as a result of unprotected sex, the condition poses "significant risk of serious bodily harm" and requires, then, that HIV-positive individuals have an obligation under the law to disclose their medical condition.

"They say you're going to be criminalized if you don't disclose, if there's any realistic possibility you have transmitted the virus, no matter how low.  They pretty much went as far as they could have gone in the direction of criminalization", said Isabel Grant, an expert on HIV disclosure law, University of British Columbia. 

Which is as it should be; intimacy and trust and human health require no less than honest revelation of a potential risk.