A Future Gift of Love: The HOPE Act

Each week at my church, a lady in a wide-brimmed hat stands during announcements to urge parishioners to "remember the blood drive!" She earnestly asks for volunteers to donate a precious, lifesaving gift. Each time she delivers her appeal, my heart sinks as the stigma of HIV rears its ugly head, and I sit silently in my pew knowing that as a person living with HIV, I am prohibited from donating blood or an organ to anyone. Not even to a family member.

But even though PLWHA may not be able to donate blood, new hope is dawning for us to be able to help take care of our own in another life-giving way. The new HIV Organ Policy Equity Act, also known as the HOPE Act, provides just that: hope.

Since 1988, federal law has banned the donation of organs by HIV-infected people and mandated that HIV-infected organs be destroyed. The HIV-positive population could not even donate organs to help others also living with HIV. Moreover, it was not legal for scientists even to study whether organ donations and transplants between HIV-positive people might be medically successful. The new HOPE Act lifts this long-standing ban against clinical research to study the possibility of HIV-positive-to-positive organ donations.

The need for organs for PLWHA is real. Hundreds of HIV-positive people are currently on waiting lists for lifesaving organ transplants. That number may be small in comparison with the potential need. For example, approximately one-fourth of the U.S. HIV-infected population is also coinfected with viral hepatitis, and the vast majority does not know it. Expanding the pool of potential donors for liver transplants could help many of them survive.

Approved by a surprisingly bipartisan majority of Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama just weeks before World AIDS Day 2013, the HOPE Act allows scientists to finally study how HIV-positive people might donate organs safely for transplants to others who are also HIV positive. It also permits future changes in national transplant regulations to approve HIV-positive-to-positive organ donations and transplants if the clinical research proves effective. Yes, the new law could lead to HIV-positive people being able to help save the lives of our own.

Feb. 14 is not only Valentine's Day but also National Donor Day. It is the day when we give from the heart, and the day the medical community encourages the gift of organ donations for transplants.

Now we who are HIV positive may not have to ignore forever the call for organ donations. Because of the legal research now permitted by the HOPE Act, we may be able to offer our livers, kidneys, corneas and other organs that we could never donate to anyone before to save other people with HIV.

So this year, on Feb. 14, we Americans living with HIV can be pleased that politics has sided with science. Hopefully, one day soon we, too, may be able to give to and receive from each other a truly great gift of love: the precious gift of donated organs.

Jesse Milan Jr. has been living with HIV for 31 years. He is chair emeritus and board member of The Black AIDS Institute and a Fellow at the Altarum Institute.