Women's Advocacy Resource Connection

The heart of CHLP’s work is the development of its national legal and policy resource bank and advocacy strategies for use by people with HIV and their advocates. A new focus in this work is the creation of a Women’s Advocacy Resource Connection (WARC). Our goal is to build the capacity of women with HIV and their representatives for effective advocacy, wherever they are in the United States. We will do this by amassing in one web-based, accessible location a broad array of materials—model legislation, case law and legal analysis, public health policy, and analyses of the science and medicine informing it all—that affect women living with HIV at local, state and national levels. We expect that these resources will enable advocates and activists nationwide and, potentially, around the world to advance the rights and health of women living with HIV/AIDS.

Women of color represent the majority of new AIDS cases, have been affected disproportionately by the epidemic, and fare more poorly than men on several important health care access and quality measures. For example, women are less likely to be hospitalized when they are seriously ill or to receive combination antiretroviral therapy. Women with HIV/AIDS also face significant social and financial barriers in getting care, and are far more likely than men to postpone their own medical care due to sickness, child care demands or lack of transportation. Studies show that many HIV affected women also avoid health care due to misinformation about both HIV and the drugs used to treat it, denial about the importance of health care, distrust of government agencies that sponsor health and service programs for those in need, and intense community-level HIV-related stigma. Racial disparities in AIDS care have actually widened since the introduction of effective drug therapies in 1996, with the greatest disparities found among women of color.

While there is great diversity of background and experience among women with HIV across the country, statistically they are more likely to be poor and women of color. There also are common denominators of experience for many women with HIV. For example, one recent study found that women’s immediate reactions upon learning that they are infected with HIV typically are devastation, shock, and indignation, and that for many women long-term responses included depression, escalated drug and alcohol use, and vulnerability to suicide. For the women in this study, it typically took many months, even years, before women could move beyond these response patterns.

The WARC initiative is our response to an increasing need for advocacy models that help to alter these patterns by clarifying and extending women’s options and rights. Our experience tells us that it is particularly important to address the needs and rights of women who are pregnant or are mothers, who are incarcerated or who have a history of substance abuse. Their need for appropriate and comprehensive access to care, for full and accurate information about their HIV diagnosis and treatment options, and for protection of rights to autonomy in personal and parental health treatment decision-making, frequently goes unaddressed.

For more information about WARC—or to talk about how you might get involved—please email Ashley Burczak at CHLP.

Browse the WARC files in CHLP's Rescource Bank.