KENYA: Study shows HIV stigma a barrier to health facility births

IRIN - Wednesday, 12 September 2012 (originally published 10 Sept )

Just 44 percent of Kenyan women have health facility deliveries. Image: Allan Gichigi/IRIN (file photo)

NAIROBI/KISUMU, 10 September 2012 (PlusNews) – When the time came for 24-year-old Jane Atieno to deliver her second child, she sought the services of a traditional birth attendant rather than the local clinic so she wouldn’t have to be tested for HIV or agonize over how to tell her husband that health workers wanted him to attend her antenatal check-ups.

“At home, nobody will bother to test your HIV status, but when I go to the clinic, they tell me they want to test for [HIV]. And they want my husband to come with me, yet I can’t convince him to do so,” she told IRIN/PlusNews from her home in Kisumu, a city in western Kenya’s Nyanza Province.

Atieno is too afraid of being stigmatized to get tested for HIV, and has never taken her child, now one year old, for testing. “When I go to the clinic, I just lie to them [that] I was tested where I gave birth,” she said . . .

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