One would expect this chapter, which begins a closer analysis of HIV-positive motherhood, to be about mothers and not about babies. Contemplating the body and mind of the HIV-positive mother, however, inevitably involves the mother contemplating her baby. Imagining a sick and dying baby invokes something quite different from imagining a sick and dying adult, for the onlooker as well as for the mother herself. The question implied is not ‘What has this baby done to deserve this?’ but the more rhetorical ‘What has this baby done to deserve this?’ The innocence of babies and the pathos elicited by something so small and new becoming sick means that the baby's body, so close to the body of the mother, comes more easily into focus. This is magnified by social expectations that the mother's body be utterly secondary to the baby's body and the mother's mind selflessly turned away from itself. When the mother is HIV-positive, with the potential that the baby might be too, HIV insinuates itself into the eclipse. Looking at one's own HIV-positive body entails looking at an infected body; looking as a mother, this body is primarily – if only potentially – infecting.

The potentiality of infection preoccupied experiences of motherhood in this study. Mothers potentially infect their babies during pregnancy or, more likely, during labour. The probability of infection is 31 per cent, reduced by a single dose of Nevirapine to 13 per cent (Department of Health, 2002). This means that the majority of children born to HIV-positive mothers are negative (Sherr, 1999). Because of the stigma associated with the disease, mother-to-child-transmission is taken much more seriously than other transmissible diseases with equivalent or higher transmission rates. After birth, mothers can only infect their babies through breastfeeding, and even then there is only an 8 per cent probability of infection.

Imagining sick and dying babies, then, is the most frightening, but not the most likely outcome. Preoccupation with infection reflects potentiality and not probability, and this preoccupation is no doubt associated with prejudice, particularly regarding the infectious potential of mothers.