Joy Is Tempered by Pain in Caring for AIDS Babies

Nobody else wanted the baby, born to a prostitute and sick with AIDS. How can that be? the two women asked. This baby is an angel. This baby is a blessing. So they brought Sabrina into their home.

The doctors warned them: The girl may only have a few weeks to live. Still, the women bought her toys and hugged her and sang her lullabies. A month passed, then two, then four. The infant grew. She thrived. And the two women, convinced that love conquers all, declared Sabrina “the miracle baby.”

In the end, the recovery was temporary, only the AIDS steadfast. Sabrina, 15 months old, was cremated in her pink and white Easter outfit with black patent leather shoes. For all their caring, the women were left with grief. Losing a child is the greatest pain of all, they said.

But, during this last year, instead of retreating into remorse, the women have taken in four more infants. Like a small but growing number of foster parents around the country, Yvonne Hardee and Laura Garcia-Pulido of Hollywood, Fla., have opened their homes to children who live under the shadow of AIDS.

The nurturing can be bittersweet, the joys of rearing a baby tempered by the possibility of an early death: “With Sabrina, I would sit in the rocker and make memories, you know, concentrate real hard on the exact moment, what she had on, what she did; who knew when there wouldn’t be any more memories to make?” Hardee, 41, said.

Foster care for babies who have AIDS, or who are very likely to get it, is fast becoming an urgent national concern. In all the dreariness about acquired immune deficiency syndrome, there is this to add: Pediatric AIDS cases are rapidly increasing.

By 1991, 10,000 to 20,000 children--mostly babies and toddlers--will be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, according to U.S. health officials. One of every 10 pediatric beds in the nation will be occupied by a child with the disease.

In the past, children became infected largely through blood transfusions. That danger has been all but eliminated. Babies now get AIDS another way: in the womb, from their mothers.

Problem Created by Drugs

Most of the new cases result from contaminated needles. More than half of the women infected with HIV are intravenous drug users--or the sex partners of IV drug users. They are young; they have babies.

The problem is so severe that some cities and states have done studies on the rate of babies born with antibodies to HIV. One in every 80 babies in New York City tests positive; one in every 200 in New Jersey; one in 205 in Florida; one in 1,200 in California.

Not all of these infants will get the disease. When a newborn is found to have antibodies to HIV, that may simply mean that the antibodies have been passed from the mother’s immune system and will disappear as the baby matures.

But, if the antibodies are still present after 18 months, then almost surely the baby has inherited the virus. That is true in about 30% to 40% of the cases, and most of those babies are likely one day to develop AIDS.

Waiting for Catastrophe

In the meantime, parents and doctors can only guess--and wait. Any rash or breathing problem is dreadfully alarming. Any burst of tears can be the foretelling of catastrophe.

Few children are more helpless than these. Often, their mothers are themselves sick with AIDS or hooked on drugs. The babies frequently are neurologically impaired from their mother’s substance abuse. Their extended families are usually poor and hard-pressed to care for them.

Without a place to go--even while still healthy--the babies may languish in the enclosed cribs of hospital wards where fluorescent lights shine down on them all day. They get no regular cuddling or love, just occasional visits from nurses who have only a few moments to stay with them.

To rescue these infants from confinement, health officials nationwide have scrambled to set up group homes or, when they can, to enlist foster parents. In most places, the efforts have been encouraging.

“Cities that make it a priority and recruit actively have been fairly successful,” said Betty Stewart, a high-level child services administrator in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

More Babies Than Homes

But long-term prospects are not good. “You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to see that the numbers will soon outstrip the services,” said Dr. James Oleske, who runs a program for children with AIDS in Newark, N. J.

To recruit parents, most agencies pay larger-than-normal stipends. In Los Angeles County, for instance, foster parents receive $1,000 a month to care for HIV-symptomatic children, more than triple the usual rate.

But the decision to take such sickly, vulnerable babies must come from the heart, not the pocket. It requires the will to endure great personal pain for the sake of a baby born to somebody else, a baby who may die.

“If they catch cold, you worry: Will this become pneumonia?” said Garcia-Pulido. “Chicken pox will kill them. They have no defenses.”

Garcia-Pulido, 39, is a widow with a 12-year-old daughter, Laurie. She works as a nurse in a Miami public hospital. She has cared for AIDS patients.

When she and Hardee, her housemate and friend since childhood, read about unwanted Sabrina in a local newspaper, it distressed them terribly.

“I just couldn’t stand the idea that this child was alone and dying and nobody cared,” Hardee said. “Every child is entitled to have at least one person who hugs and kisses them.”

They both had talked about bringing another youngster into the house. As long as Garcia-Pulido worked, Hardee was free to stay home. They wanted to meet this poor abandoned baby.

Sabrina, then 9 months old, was already sick with AIDS. She could not sit up or grasp a toy. Her facial muscles were weak; her lips never parted into a full smile. Breathing was sometimes a labor.

But “her brown eyes had a special glow; she seemed to be trying to tell you: Touch me, pick me up and hold me,” Garcia-Pulido said.

Assured About Risks

Was it safe? Social workers told them they were in no danger of getting the disease as long as they used common sense: Wear rubber gloves when changing diapers; use bleach to clean up any blood.

Still, Hardee was hesitant at first: “I worried that, if I put my hand in my mouth after I held her, I’d catch AIDS. Of course, that lasted about a minute and a half. Sabrina had a coughing spasm, and I went right to work.”

The two women fell into the normal routines of parenthood: feed, wash, hold, shush. Others around them, however, were not so relaxed.

Some neighbors simply shut the two women out of their lives. One went door to door: “Did you hear? They’ve taken in a black baby with AIDS.”

Hardee’s aunt said that her niece was no longer welcome at Christmas dinner. “She said she was afraid germs would jump off my clothes,” Hardee said.

Hardee worked as a volunteer at Laurie’s school. After she brought Sabrina home, she was told not to send any more cupcakes for the students.

These hurts made the women angry, but they were too busy with the baby to wallow in it. And too happy, as well.

There is an intensity, they found, to loving a baby whose life may be all too brief, especially an infant as easy to please as Sabrina.

The urge was to prize every moment: the reach for a toy, the giggle during a nursery rhyme, the turning of her head to see a face in the window.

Sabrina soon began to smile. She loved playing patty-cake hour after hour. Her eyes lit up at the sound of the song “Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” She could listen for hours to the recorded voice of her Mother Goose toy. She enjoyed being pushed through the mall in her stroller.

Baby Gains 5 Pounds

In a short time, her weight increased by 5 pounds. Doctors were surprised. Surely, the AIDS had not gone away, but the child was looking healthy enough for the label of a Gerber jar.

“After 3 1/2 to 4 months, that’s when we began calling her the miracle baby,” Garcia-Pulido said. “From a medical point of view, maybe I knew better. But I told myself God can do anything.”

During those hopeful weeks, they took in a second baby--the son of a cocaine-addicted prostitute. He, too, would be a miracle baby, they thought.

But, then, one breezy afternoon, all the talk of miracles stopped as suddenly as a door slamming shut in the wind.

There were two tiny spots on Sabrina’s skin. “Let’s go,” said Garcia-Pulido, the trained nurse.

“Where?”

“The hospital.”

Grew Weaker for Months

Sabrina was bleeding internally. She would grow weaker for two months, shrinking in the bed. She lost the ability to suck; she lost her smile.

Wish for Baby

At the funeral, Hardee wished that the baby, lying so still, could be awakened with a kiss like Sleeping Beauty. “The pain was so bad, I told myself: No more babies; this is too hard,” she said.

A month later the social worker was on the phone. Don’t say no until you see this other baby we need a home for, she pleaded.

The boy had scaly skin and some of his hair had come off in patches. He was hyperactive. “But he had such a lover’s smile, as if to say: Aren’t I cute?” Hardee remembered.

These days, there are four babies living in the modest four-bedroom house about midway between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. The infants have been somewhat slowed in their development by the months they lived in hospitals. They suffer from the drugs their mothers took during pregnancy.

One Child Always Crying

There is a semi-controlled rumpus at the house. At least one voice is always crying. One foot is without a shoe, one elbow scraped, one hand digging through the cat food.

The oldest is a girl, 23 months. She likes to walk around with a brush, trying to reach for everyone’s hair. The boys are 16 months, 14 months and 6 months. The older two sleep together in a bed built to look like a race car. They are agile enough to hop out and hang on the dresser drawers.

None of the children show the symptoms of the virus; but none have yet to test negative for the antibodies, either. Three of the babies are at the age when the antibodies ought to have disappeared if they are to escape the disease.

Baby Losing Weight

So these are tense times. The months of the calendar flip by. Lately, the 16-month-old is losing weight. “With another child, you’d say, there goes the baby fat; with an AIDS baby, you don’t say that,” Hardee said.

No, with these babies, there may be something grim inside, waiting its awful turn. The little girl walks into the room. She is holding a big doll, one that was first bought for Sabrina.

Suddenly, she begins to tremble. The doll falls. Her eyes get very large, and she looks around. “What is it, honey?” her foster mother asks. “What’s the matter?”

But there is no answer from the little girl. “I guess it was nothing,” Hardee says. “I guess.”

Times researcher Anna Virtue contributed to this story.