Moving forward backward

Last week President Bush gave a speech about AIDS to an audience in Philadelphia. The speech made headlines because Bush used the word ‘condoms’ in reference to preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. His exact words were:

We can learn from the experiences of other countries when it comes to a good program to prevent the spread of AIDS, like the nation of Uganda. They’ve started what they call the ABC approach to prevention of this deadly disease. That stands for Abstain, Be faithful in marriage, and, when appropriate, use Condoms.

It sounds like the president was, in a roundabout way, advocating the use of condoms to prevent HIV infection. But the week before this speech was delivered the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) promulgated new regulations for AIDS education groups that accept federal money. The new guidelines limit the messages these organizations can distribute via “‘pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula,’ ‘audiovisual materials’ and ‘pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings),’ as well as ‘advertising’ and web-based info” (see The Nation article).

The intent of the regs is to enforce the use of abstinence-only education. Indeed, they go so far as to require that sex-ed content include information about the “inneffectiveness of condoms.” This despite the fact that condom use is almost 100% effective at preventing HIV infection while abstinence-only education has proven wholly ineffective.

[James] Wagoner, [executive director of Advocates for Youth, a Washington-based coalition of youth service groups and the country’s leading exponent and provider of safe-sex education], contrasts the Bush war on the condom with its attitude toward seatbelts. “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is constantly telling Americans, ‘Use Seatbelts!’ It’s all over their website. But the American College of Emergency Physicians concluded in a study that seatbelts fail to protect lives 55 percent of the time, and fail to protect health 45 percent of the time. For the Administration to engage in its constant drumbeat that condoms — which are not 100 percent effective for all sexually transmitted diseases but are nearly so for preventing AIDS — are ‘ineffective’ in HIV prevention, while promoting seatbelts as ‘effective,’ shows that the CDC’s anti-condom requirements are all about politics, not science.” And, says Mark McLaurin, HIV-prevention director for New York’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis, “The President’s faint nod to condoms in his speech is particularly galling in light of his CDC’s proposal to tie the hands of prevention providers.”

President Bush is setting aside programs that are saving people’s lives because he thinks it is his job to save their souls. It is maddening to see how much control social conservatives have over the policies of independent agencies of the federal government.

A study by Columbia University department of sociology chairman Peter Bearman followed the lives of 12,000 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old over a five-year period. Released in March, and partially funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the study found that while 59 percent of teenage males who did not pledge abstinence used a condom during sex, only 40 percent of abstinence-pledging boys used a condom. Bearman told the New York Times that telling teens “to ‘just say no’ without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk turns out to create greater risk” of HIV and other STDs.