Misguided Faith on AIDS

[Guest guest]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/15/opinion/15WED1.html?th

 

October 15, 2003Misguided Faith on AIDS

In August, the United States Agency for International Development abruptly

canceled bids for a program to market condoms to gay men and others in Brazil.

When the decision was criticized publicly, the agency reinstated most of the

program. This was the right choice. Preventing the spread of AIDS means working

with the groups most at risk.

 

But the cancellation was just a recent example of the Bush administration's

efforts to transform American initiatives abroad related to sex: AIDS

prevention, family planning and sex education. Decisions about these programs —

which can mean life or death to the people who use them — are increasingly not

based on what saves lives, but on what appeals to conservatives at home.

 

Conservatives in Congress monitor the Web sites of the agency and its

contractors for references to sex workers, gay men or drug users, and have

forced the agency to discourage these projects. The right sees working with such

groups as an endorsement of abhorrent behavior. But these high-risk groups are

the most likely to contract and spread AIDS. To ignore them is to fuel the

epidemic.

 

Condoms are also under attack. Bush administration officials have tried to

remove international endorsements of condom use. President Bush's decision to

stop the funds for any overseas family-planning group that mentions abortion has

also effectively stopped condom provision to 16 countries and reduced it to 13

others, including some with the world's highest rates of AIDS infection.

 

Congress's appropriation for the president's AIDS initiative stipulates that a

third of the money for AIDS prevention go to promote abstinence until marriage,

a requirement that will strip needed funds from more effective programs. The

Agency for International Development is increasingly financing groups promoting

abstinence. Earlier this year, for example, the agency denied funds to a highly

regarded AIDS prevention program in Africa to give the money to a consortium of

evangelical groups whose proposal was considered deficient on the merits, but

whose leader has links to an influential conservative in Congress.

 

While every good AIDS prevention program includes messages about postponing sex

or reducing the number of sexual partners, the blanket advocacy of abstinence

until marriage is a proven failure at protecting people from disease. The

message has no meaning for gay men or for women who are forced by poverty into

prostitution. In much of Africa, teenage girls — many of them AIDS orphans

themselves — are coerced into sex by older, wealthier men. Knowing how to

negotiate condom use could save their lives. The right's answer to AIDS is the

sexual equivalent of " just say no, " and is no more effective. It should not

become the foundation of Washington's efforts to fight AIDS abroad.

 

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

 

 

 

 

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