Grey's Anatomy & HIV

This weekend I rewatched a couple episodes from this season of Grey’s Anatomy (yes, I patiently downloaded the entire season on iTunes, week by week) and was reminded of two posts that I meant to write the first time I saw these episodes. The first is from an episode called ‘Piece of My Heart’.

In this show, a young, married couple comes into the clinic and requests a pregnancy test. After performing the test, Izzie (Katherine Heigel) tells the couple that they are indeed pregnant, congratulates them and offers some free samples of prenatal vitamins. However, the couple does not respond with joy. The woman begins to cry and tells Izzie that they need to schedule an abortion. Izzie suggests they take some time to think before making such a decision and the woman responds that there is no decision to make, that she has been HIV-positive since the age of nineteen and a condom had broken and now she is pregnant. She refuses to risk having an HIV-positive baby.

The couple continue to insist that they want an abortion, until Izzie comes through with the following speech:

“If you want to have an abortion because you want to have an abortion, then that’s between you and whatever god you believe in. But if you want to have an abortion because you think that’s what medicine’s telling you to do, then that’s between you and me…I wasn’t tell you there was some chance your baby might not be born sick. I was telling you there is a 98 percent chance your baby could be born perfectly healthy. A 98 percent chance. There’s a higher chance of your baby being born with down syndrome than there is of you passing HIV on to your child.”

Thank you, Grey’s Anatomy, not just for providing me with my weekly dose of McDreamy and drama at Seattle Grace, but for presenting HIV in such a way – showing that this disease affects not only homosexuals and intravenous drug users and Africans, but also young, white, heterosexual, American women, and showing that drugs exist that can basically eliminate mother-to-child transmission.