Will the betrayals become common?

A young woman's betrayal
This morning I met a young woman who had just found out about her husband's HIV positive status four days earlier. She had found out accidently. Her husband had gone for a lab test and one afternoon she decided to go pick the results on her own, as a favor to her husband. There they handed over his CD4 lab results and she learned that her husband is HIV positive.The couple has only been married for a year. She is only 22 years old and appears delicate and innocent, a typical young South Asian bride. Her husband belongs to one of the richest families in the city and had known about his HIV status well before his marriage. He has been on medicines for well over a year. When he announced to the physician that he was going to get married, he assured his doctor that he had informed his future wife of his HIV status. A few days ago the truth came out that this wasn't accurate information.She had come to the clinic yesterday, with her husband. He sat quietly on a bench across from the physician's desk, while she sat close to the doctor. They had both come to the clinic because they want to have a child. Emotions were high during the session Dr. Bharti held with the young woman. She was stiff with anger and two or three times repeated "Shouldn't he have told me before?" The physician acknowledged her sense of pain and anger. The husband sat quietly and listened as the physician tried to cover the wide range of information that was neccessary to cover. He tried to emphasize to her that she first needs time to come to terms with learning about her husband's HIV status and his (and his family's) dishonesty in not sharing this information with her before marrying her and denying her the information for the past year of her marriage.Today she arrived back in the clinic with her husband in tow, and resolutely replied that on the question of whether to have a child, "I've left it up to him to decide." In her next sentence, she said "There are no alternatives." In her conscious, she has decided that she wants to have a child with her husband, despite the risks that she may become infected and her child may also then become HIV positive.This young woman has many challenging decisions to make in the next few months. I was struck by the lack of response or responsibility that her husband displayed. The burden of the decisions and emotions have been squarely placed on her shoulders, while placing her in a precarious position if she decides to "stray" from her "wifely duties" to provide her husband and his family with a child. She is very young and from my observation, needs intense professional counselling in order to come to an independent decision that she will be confident she made without the influence of her husband or his family or a sense of guilt.This pressure of the social custom to have a child in many traditional societies is one reason that microbicides are a pressing need to the women of the world. This young woman is one story out of the millions of women around the world facing infection by the virus because the men they trust are not taking the confidence these women have in them seriously.