The Fine Print Blog

by Joseph Sonnabend, M.D.,
CHLP Medical Resource Specialist,
and Ashley Burczak,
CHLP Program and Development Associate

All across the country, at AIDS conferences and medical provider “summits,” and from professional organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, we hear the call for dispensing with informed consent in HIV testing to a more doctor-centered approach—“opt-out” testing—which relieves health care providers of the obligation to explain HIV and its consequences before testing patients for it.

by Margo Kaplan
Staff Attorney

Reliance on stigma over fact puts teenagers at greater risk by teaching them that avoiding HIV is not a matter of avoiding risky activities but rather avoiding “risky people.”

by Ashley Burczak
Program and Development Associate, Co-Founder and Former Executive Director of Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER)

The National Sexuality Resource Center has released a new study on the impact of abstinence-only programs, and their findings point to problems so deep that these programs can actually be considered a human rights violation.

by Derrick Bell
Professor, New York University School of Law

If African Americans constituted their own country, the prevalence of HIV would qualify the country to receive billions from the United States to fight AIDS. However, because they live in the United States, their health care is massively ignored and, as a result, African Americans are disproportionately bearing the brunt of HIV in this country.

by Alison Mehlman
CHLP Director of Planning & Policy Research

The introductory language accompanying the proposed rule explicitly states that the regulation "does not limit patient access to health care." But how can it not?

by Victoria Neilson
Legal Director
Immigration Equality

Under the current policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, foreign nationals with HIV will continue to be excluded from the United States.

by Margo Kaplan

by Alison Mehlman