Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - Sunday 05 May 2002
Carmel Rickard
The hearing had continued way past the normal close of business but counsel for the Treatment Action Campaign, Gilbert Marcus SC, held the audience and the judges in complete silence as he etched for them the plight of a mother on whose behalf the campaign is waging its legal battle.
He said he had asked the state's legal representatives at three previous hearings to give a constitutionally defensible answer to her story, but without success.
He told of a pregnant woman who knew she was HIV positive, who had been tested and counselled and who knew that nevirapine would reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to her child.
She was too poor to afford private treatment, and because she did not live close to an official pilot facility, when she went into labour she was taken to a hospital which was not a designated site. There she told the doctor on duty that her informed choice was for nevirapine .
The doctor, said Marcus, would be obliged to say that he or she was precluded by state policy from prescribing the medication.
Marcus said that a policy which led to such consequences "does not meet even the minimum requirement of rationality". It confronted doctors with an intolerable dilemma and was "an invitation to civil disobedience", while for the mothers "already afflicted with a deadly disease" it was "nothing short of an assault on their psychological integrity".
As far as the children were concerned, decisions taken in terms of this policy were "the beginning of a process of acute suffering and premature death".
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