Thanks to Holly Richardson, I now know that breastfeeding is recommended for HIV positive women in many parts of the world.

As Dr Hoosen Coovadia, a pediatrician in South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal, told the 14th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, instructing HIV-infected mothers in developing nations to breast-feed would result in about 300,000 children becoming infected with HIV, but would save 1.5 million from dying of other diseases.

On one level, I can absorb and understand this information; it makes sense when you look at the numbers. On another, every fiber of my being struggles to reject it as being just too horrible a Catch-22 to lend credence to with comprehension.

I know I'm not alone as an internationally adoptive parent when I stretch my mind to the dark corners that harbor the reality my children's birth mothers lived, and try to imagine the dead ends that served as the only options around ... all about on par with the HIV+: to breast feed or not to breast feed dilemma.

There is no way to know if HIV was a factor in the surrendering of my children, although a lack of antibodies in their systems would suggest not, but even if that disease wasn't, another ... poverty or oppression or abuse, or any item on the long list of circumstances that could force a woman to abandon her newborn to an unforeseeable fate ... was most certainly presented as a river too deep to ford.

Perhaps there were already too many mouths to feed, and finding enough for a baby would mean certain death for a toddler. Maybe a discovered pregnancy would result in the mother being beaten or banished, or worse. It could be that choice came down to abandonment or infanticide and the mother could not make herself kill her child outright. I have no doubt that a list of actual scenarios would make any attempt here look like the pitifully limited vision of life in many parts of the world it is.

Continued ...