About the Book

Birth in the Age of AIDS is a vivid and poignant portrayal of the experiences of HIV-positive women in India during pregnancy, birth, and motherhood at the beginning of the 21st century. The government of India, together with global health organizations, established an important public health initiative to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child. While this program, which targets poor women attending public maternity hospitals, has improved health outcomes for infants, it has resulted in sometimes devastatingly negative consequences for poor, young mothers because these women are being tested for HIV in far greater numbers than their male spouses and are often blamed for bringing this highly stigmatized disease into the family.

Based on research conducted by the author in India, this book chronicles the experiences of women from the point of their decisions about whether to accept HIV testing, through their decisions about whether or not to continue with the birth if they test HIV-positive, their birthing experiences in hospitals, decisions and practices surrounding breast-feeding vs. bottle-feeding, and their hopes and fears for the future of their children.

Related Articles, Book Chapters, and Blogs

2014 Reflections on the U.S.- India Standoff on Generics. Invited blog for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Global Health Policy. November 5, 2014. 

2014 Closing the Gap in India: How Shortages of Anti-retroviral Therapies Could Jeopardize India’s Race to Eradicate AIDS. Invited Blog for Stanford University Press on World AIDS Day.

2011 Breast or Bottle? HIV-Positive Women’s Responses to Global Health Policy on Infant Feeding in India. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 25(4):499-518. 

2011 Birth in the Age of AIDS: local responses to global policies and technologies in South India. In Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives. Carolyn Sargent and Carole Browner, eds. Pp. 83–95. Durham: Duke University Press.  

2011 HIV/AIDS: Global Policies, Local Realities. In Companion to the Anthropology of India. Isabelle Clark-Deces, ed. Pp. 464–481. Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.  

2010 HIV/AIDS and the Gendering of Stigma in Tamil Nadu, South India. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 34(4):633–657.  

2007 Navigating HIV, Pregnancy, and Childbearing in South India: Pragmatics and Constraints in women’s decision-making. Medical Anthropology 26(7): 7–52.  

2005 Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of “Traditional” Indian Medicine for HIV/AIDS. In Asian Medicine and Globalization. Joseph Alter, ed. Pp. 88–106. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Media

January 15, 2014. Interview with Sabith Khan in MENASA

November 29, 2013. USAID’s Bureau of Global Health Blog Review

May 8, 2013. Article by M.T. Saju in Times of India-Chennai. “Book on AIDS among Women Shows Despair, Courage in TN”

April 24, 2013. Georgetown University Asian Studies Multi-Media Podcast, Public Health in Asia Series: “Interview with Cecilia Van Hollen: ‘Birth in the Age of AIDS: Women, Reproduction, and HIV/AIDS in India”

January 15, 2013. “Getting to Know: Cultural anthropologist Cecilia Van Hollen” by Lindsey Briggs, Syracuse University News

Spring 2009. “Indians and AIDS” by Renée Levy. In Maxwell Perspective.

“A Voice for South Asian Women: Cecilia Van Hollen” by Amy Shires In “Outward Bound,” Syracuse University Magazine Winter 2006–07, 23( 4)

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Reviews

“…path-breaking…Van Hollen’s compassionate, humanizing account sheds light on women’s strength and resilience in the midst of a cruel epidemic.”

— Marcia C. Inhorn, Yale University

“…a deeply sensitive and thoughtful account of global health interventions on the ground.”

— João Biehl, Princeton University

“…ground-breaking… an essential teaching resource for… medical anthropology and sociology, and global health.”

— Kaveri Qureshi, University of Oxford. Pacific Affairs

“Van Hollen…vividly brings out the stark realities that women living with HIV face during their reproductive years…. Birth in the Age of AIDS provides a new perspective on the history of the international and domestic response to the AIDS epidemic in India”

— Robert Clay and Marta Levitt, USAID’s Bureau of Global Health

“…brilliant, genre-crossing ethnography…Van Hollen proves that careful ethnographic research is indispensable to understanding the actual, lived effects of infectious disease control programs, an insight that will surely resonate with public and global health practitioners and other readers outside of anthropology. This is feminist medical anthropology at its best”

— Lynn Morgan, Mount Holyoke College. Anthropology & Medicine

“Lucidly documented research findings along with discussion on policy insights make this book an important reading for all who are directly or indirectly engaged in the field of reproductive and child health.”

— Shalini Rudra, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Economic and Political Weekly

“…deeply empathic, elegantly crafted, incisive, and thoroughly engaging analysis…women’s voices are manifested with all of the profound feeling, complexity, and nuance that is attendant on struggles for adequate and meaningful self-representation in contexts of inequality, marginalization, poverty, and stigmatization…a profound, important, and wonderfully accessible book”

— Joseph Alter, University of Pittsburgh. American Ethnologist

“…insightful…a sorely needed intervention in the literature...Part of why the book is so compelling is that it is informed by the author’s long history of intellectual and compassionate engagement with reproductive health care in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu….the anthropology of reproduction at its best.”

— Sharmila Rudrappa, University of Texas-Austin. Global Public Health

Awards

2012 Steven Polgar Paper Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology. Best Paper Published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly in 2011-12. For 2011 “Breast or Bottle? HIV-Positive Women’s Responses to Global Health Policy on Infant Feeding in India”.

Reproduction, Globalization, and the State: New Theoretical and Ethnographic Perspectives edited by Carolyn Sargent and Carole Browner recieved the 2012 Society for Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker Memorial Prize for its contribution to scholarship on gender and health. My piece, “Birth in the Age of AIDS: local responses to global policies and technologies in South India” was a featured chapter in the book.