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Anti-Choice Ideology Infecting HIV/AIDS Policy

Jill

A guest-post by Kelly Castagnaro, Director of Communications at the International Women’s Health Coalition.

Despite evidence—and the efforts of Rep. Betty McCollum, experts and advocates around the world—the full House voted yesterday to reauthorize a $50 billion global HIV/AIDS relief initiative that threatens to further restrict, rather than support, expansion of HIV prevention through family planning services.

Several advocates and the mainstream media have overwhelmingly touted the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as a legacy-building success, and in one case, the “AIDS relief miracle.” Today, nearly two million more people have access to anti-retroviral medication than five years ago due to U.S. government support. However, the number of people newly infected with HIV continues to outpace the number of people on treatment —hardly a miraculous approach to sustainable public health programming.

For women and girls, HIV/AIDS is fundamentally a sexual and reproductive health and rights issue. They are vulnerable because their rights are widely violated. More than four-fifths of new infections in women occur in marriage or long term relationships. They could be protected if their access to reproductive health services and education was expanded. They could be protected if bureaucrats in Washington didn’t insist on exporting faulty abstinence and faithfulness prevention programming to communities where women cannot abstain and are already faithful.

But the real tragedy is that lawmakers have missed the opportunity to take a step towards ending, rather than managing, the pandemic by refusing to talk about sex. Sexual transmission is a leading cause of new infections worldwide. However, hysteria surrounding abortion and premarital sex has prevented lawmakers from engaging in debate about what works and what doesn’t for people who are fighting this disease in their homes, in their communities and in their countries.

Public health experts on the ground must be able to determine the best mix of prevention programming. As it stands, their hands are tied by mandates from Washington politicos who can only talk about sex publicly when their extramarital affairs and indiscretions are exposed.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has approved a similar $50 billion bill, which the full Senate will soon consider. Let’s hope they recognize that there are no quick fixes to the global AIDS pandemic, and find a way to help women deal with their lives and their health in a humane way.

5 thoughts on Anti-Choice Ideology Infecting HIV/AIDS Policy

  1. I would like to add a plea for readers to consider helping women living in the U.S. affiliated Pacific region–American Samoa, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam–which suffers enormous health disparities due in part to limited Federal assistance, and in part due to the post-colonial era per capita income: for example, it is only $2,900 in the Marshall Islands, and $2,300 in the Federated States of Micronesia. For comparison, the U.S. per capita income is $46,000. Even a small donation to the GUAHAN Project (http://www.guahanproject.org/index.php)–the regional AIDS service organization–can make a huge difference for women in these small, culturally rich enclaves that could be destroyed by HIV/AIDS.

  2. What’s sad is that the bill’s shortcomings aren’t being widely reported; I read the article in my newspaper the other day, and it’s being lauded as a great aid effort towards Africa – no mention at all of abstinence. If I hadn’t already known what the policy was, I would have thought that Bush was doing something right – scary.

  4. Paragraph 44 of the house bill would legitmize the junk science supposedly linking circumcision to HIV transmission. Obviously it’s nonsense or the US wouldn’t have three times the AIDS problem uncut Europe has. In non-cutting Japan AIDS is more rare than in 95%-cut Israel.

    Public health policy that claims circumcision can fight AIDS will only disempower women to insist that their partners use a condom. And why would the partners want to? They *know* they’re immune and now that 20,000 sexual nerve endings have been amputated, they’re in no mood to glove up and lose more sensation.

    Most of the half-million US men who have died of AIDS were cut at birth. Circumcision does not prevent AIDS. HIS body HIS decision.

  5. Good god, I just saw it. We already know the Bush administration and Big Pharma are Best Friends Forever, but in reading about how the Bushco policy results in a) lots more folks on meds and b) the crippling of prevention, i.e, lots of new cases to put on meds, using taxpayer funds to pay for the drugs, rather than for effective prevention… let’s just say I saw a stunning symmetry.

    I believe that’s what they call “synergy.”

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