Ways to Not Prevent HIV: Praise the lord, cross your legs… but pass the paycheck

Julie Davids

Ways to Not Prevent HIV: Praise the lord, cross your legs… but pass the paycheck

What's more sobering: the seemingly relentless documentation of what a bad idea it is to give billions of dollars to right-wing religious outfits worldwide to promote "abstinence-only-until-marriage" programs under the guise of HIV prevention, or our collective inability, thus far, to stop this foolishness and redirect funding to genuine prevention efforts?

From chastity fashion mail order to the slashing of effective HIV prevention programs in Uganda, we're living through a fundamental and fundamentalist shift in public health and civic life that's pure fuel for HIV's fire.

It's not just with HIV, of course, where the Right is putting a poison pill in worldwide health efforts, from the UN on down. But HIV just may be the biggest cash cow, with a billion more for '07, Claude Allen noted, going to the Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has to spend at least a third of prevention funds on pushing chastity. And the dreck being pushed in our schools thru Federal and state bucks is one of the very few growth areas in domestic spending.

Last week, the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) and Health GAP (Global Access Project) launched PEPFAR Watch, rolling it out just in time to highlight the GAO report that re-confirms that mandating hundreds of millions of PEPFAR bucks to abstinence-only is a really, really bad idea.

The site gives us a fun range of ways to say it's not working. GAO says it, well, kind of dry: "Satisfying the... abstinence-until-marriage spending requirement presents challenges to most country teams"... Health GAP makes it plain and dire, noting that "[This] policy, despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, is adding bodies to the viral death march."

And the site also links us to foe of the multilateral Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria Rep. Chris Smith (R, NJ ), who attacks the report's methods in defense of his leader-in-chief.

No matter how you say it, rates of HIV in women worldwide are spiraling upward under this Administration's watch. What's more, they are putting a whole lot of money in the pockets of groups with a much broader range of harmful projects. Even if fighting HIV isn't your passion, joining forces to stop this free ride for fundamentalists is time well spent if we can strip resources from some of our most powerful reactionary conservatives.

Julie Davids: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 7:34 AM, Apr 11, 2006 in Government Accountability | Health Care
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Comments

Its even harder to wait for marraige if you can't even get married.

I have no faith in faith-based medical policy.

I'm not sure how these issues play to the wider American audience (I'm in NYC). I know that despite the Britny Spears culture Americans tend towards Puritanism. But I do think they probably want health policy that saves people's lives more than they want to punish people for being human (i.e. having sex). Maybe the crux is explaining to the public how abstinance only education is proven to fail. The fundies however use their own numbers to lie and say that their programs work. So then we are caught in a battle over stats.

Battles over stats loose the public's interest (unless its baseball statistics).
Any thoughts on how to tackle this?

The wider American audience, when polled, persistently supports comprehensive sex education for their kids when the questions are phrased clearly -- that is to say, if it is explained that comp sex ed includes abstinence, and that abstinence-only is NOT "abstinence is best, but if you are going to have sex, use a condom."

Rather than battling over stats, many of us are pointing to the actual content of the abs-only curricula -- which more often than not stereotypes and demeans the aspirations and roles of women/girls and men/boys alike; labels all contraception as faulty; stigmatizes people with HIV, gay people, and unmarried parents; and is just plain rife with inaccuracies.

But also, bringing the "logic" of the abs-only programs to their full expression, do most parents really expect or even want their young adult/college/working children to truly stay sexually chaste until the day of their marriage, in a society where more and more people wait till their late 20's or 30's to take vows -- if they are indeed legal entitled to do so?

Art Caplan put it well on MSNBC last fall (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9504871/):

There may be a sillier strategy for dealing with sex among teens than promoting the choice of "abstinence-only-until-marriage," but I am not quite sure what it is. Not only is such an approach contradicted by everything that medicine and science know about teens and sex, but it flies directly in the face of everything all ordinary Americans know about teens and sex.