Elizabeth Glaser

Elizabeth Glaser was an AIDS activist who contracted HIV in a blood transfusion in 1981 while giving birth to her daughter, Ariel. She learned of her infection in 1985, and that she had passed the virus on to Ariel through breast milk and to her son Jake, born in 1984, in utero. Ariel died in 1988 and Elizabeth died in 1994. Jake has survived into adulthood.

When seeking treatment for their daughter, Glaser and her husband, actor and director Paul Michael Glaser, discovered that no AIDS drugs had yet been tested or approved for children. She co-founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, now called the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, to raise money for pediatric HIV/AIDS research.

In 1992, Glaser spoke at the Democratic National Convention, criticizing the federal government's response to the AIDS crisis.