Condom Kingdom Deflated by Failure (Are You Listening, Bill?)

November 22, 2002

Volume 4/ Number 29

Dear Colleague:

The world richest contradiction made headlines this week by appearing in India alongside a giant hot-air condom. Gates was scoring business points by giving away a $100 million on condoms programs. But perhaps his wife and growing family (the Gateses now have three small children), along with the evidence presented below, will convince him that handing out condoms to kids is not a good idea.

Steven W. Mosher

President

Condom Kingdom Deflated by Failure (Are You Listening, Bill?)

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates was welcomed to the Indian city of Hyderabad last week by a giant air-filled condom. The 8-foot monstrosity brought a smile to the face of the world’s richest man, who was there to announce a $100 million AIDS program to be financed by his foundation.(1)

Hyderabad, of course, is the site of Microsoft’s first software development center outside the United States. Gates’s glee may have been prompted by the thought of all the goodwill that his generosity would buy among the Indian people. By blanketing the country with condoms, he would single-handedly stop the spread of HIV.

Perhaps Gates is unaware of what a failure condom-pushing programs have been in the past:

· The Center for Disease Control has reluctantly, but accurately,

questioned the effectiveness of condoms in protecting against sexually transmitted diseases, noting that the failure rate for condoms can be as high as 15%.(2)

· The highly-regarded international peer-reviewed medical journal, The

Lancet, in 2000 published an article in which the authors argued that the massive distribution of condoms in conjunction with a “safe sex” message may actually help spread the HIV virus.(3)

· The pro-abortion Allan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) notes a condom

failure

rate as high as 17.6%.(4)

· The condom failure rate in the West is so high that over 65% of

approximately 3,000 condom users surveyed discontinued use after 24

months.(5)

· A new UN report suggests that monogamy, not condoms, is the answer

to

the AIDS epidemic.(6)

· Even Gates’s own foundation has effectively dissed condoms. On the

limited utility of AIDS prevention methods among African women, the Gates Foundation states that “if it diminishes sexual pleasure, it is unlikely to be used reliably.”(7)

Condoms have other drawbacks as well. They can lead to increased rates of abortion as a back-up method of so-called family planning. They can cause cervical cancer.(8) And, as was recently documented in Tanzania, substandard condoms-which can contribute directly to the spread of disease-are a problem.(9)

The Gates Foundation’s AIDS project in India claims to fulfill, among others, the unmet need for AIDS prevention among prostitutes and their clients, “truck drivers, migrant laborers, [and] construction workers” who are “a key group to reach” for AIDS prevention.(10) But why encourage these high risk groups, which are already riddled with the disease, to play Russian roulette with their lives? A one-in-six failure rate after two years means that many will sooner or later contract the disease, condoms or no. And what about the rights of women who are reduced to “sex work”? For them, the world’s richest man offers only false promises of protection and continued bondage.

All of this leads one to wonder what the real intent of the Gates Foundation is: AIDS eradication or population control. The Foundation is, after all, closely allied with the leading of population control organizations. The Gates Foundation gave $1.7 million to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in 1998,(11) for example, at a time when that organization was supporting involuntary sterilization programs in

Peru,(12) and involuntary abortion in China.(13)

The promotion of condoms, however uncertain its effect on the AIDS epidemic, has a definite and depressing effect on fertility. Couples wearing condoms won’t be having children in any numbers. The popularity of “AIDS education programs” among the anti-people movement is explained by this convergence. AIDS education, as currently practiced, is population control.