The HIV Morning After Pill and Why No One’s Heard of it

It’s sticky to say that morality and medicine have no place together. Because clearly we want doctors to act in a moral way when dealing with life and death. But moral judgments of health problems that result in withholding information or lack of treatment just seems absurd.

Turns out there’s a drug that can prevent AIDS, basically a HIV morning after pill, much like (but more intense than) the pregnancy morning after pill. But it’s only available in a few states and no one knows about it.

The reason why of course is the childish belief that if you give people a way to potentially remedy risky behavior (abortion, condoms, the morning after pill), society will go buck wild. Of course, this logic over looks two giant facts: 1) People are never ever, ever going to stop having sex no matter what. 2) These drugs are extremely toxic and wholly unpleasant, not exactly something you are going to repeatedly sign yourself up for if you don’t really have to and last I heard abortions were no walk in the park.

As Antonio Urbina, a medical director at St. Vincent Catholic Medical Center's HIV clinic said in the Mother Jones article:

“We don't deny care to smokers or people who didn't buckle their seat belts. It says a lot about the political climate around sexuality and homophobia."

Exactly. People fuck up, mistakes happen. Either you treat it like the preventable medical problem that it is or as a country you deal with the impact of 40,000 people a year infected with HIV (not to mention what this drug could potentially mean in places like Africa).