February16, 2000
Volume 2/ Number 3
Dear Friend and Colleague:
William Jefferson Clinton has promised the “family planning” lobby in Washington, DC, to restore spending for foreign “family planning” to its 1995 record level. In his 2001 budget summary, the President couches population control for black Africans in terms of AIDS prevention, while scholars show little connection between condom use and preventing the spread of the epidemic.
Steven W. Mosher
President
Clinton’s Foreign Family Planning Targets Africa
‘Condoms reduces AIDS’ myth shattered by scholars
Stung by last year’s cuts in international family planning spending, President Clinton has publicly called for Congress to increase funding for so-called “population stabilization” programs by a record $170 million. What he didn’t say was that the bulk of this money will probably be spent to reduce the fertility of black Africans.
In 1999, for example, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) requested over $150 million for family planning programs targeting Sub-Saharan Africa, a round $50 million more than it requested for all of Asia. This disproportion is all the more striking because far more people live in Asia (3.66 billion) than in Africa (788 million). Why does the Clinton Administration spend seven times as much money per capita to contracept or sterilize the average African woman than it does the average Asian woman?
Clinton’s public justification for taking aim at Africans is the AIDS epidemic that is raging in their midst. According to his budget summary, which was released in early February, AIDS education and prevention campaigns will receive the bulk of the new funding. Most of these campaigns center on the promotion, distribution, and marketing of condoms.
Now it is true that AIDS has a death grip on Africa. Roughly 85 percent of the 16.3 million who have died from AIDS worldwide from the beginning of the epidemic in the late 80s were from Sub-Saharan Africa. Life spans in the region will plummet from 59 years in the early 1990s to only 45 by 2010. Worse yet, most of those who succumb to the disease are in their 20s and 30s, and leave behind young children. An estimated 10 million African children have been orphaned to date. According to Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the United Nations HIV/AIDS agency (UNAIDS), half of all newborn babies in Africa carry the HIV virus (International Conference on AIDS, Zambia, 12 September 1999). Something must be done about this tragedy.
But is Clinton’s response—shipping more container-loads of condoms to African ports with detailed instructions on their use—the answer? There is new evidence that condom promotion programs, rather than dampening this epidemic, may in fact be fueling it.
Writing in the British medical journal, The Lancet, Dr. John Richens and his colleagues at the University College London suggest that “increased condom use will increase the number of [HIV/AIDS] transmissions that result from condom failure” and could negatively affect the decisions of individuals to “switch from inherently safer strategies of partner selection or fewer partners to the riskier strategy of developing or maintaining higher rates of partner change plus reliance on condoms.” They posit that “a vigorous condom promotion policy could increase rather than decrease unprotected sexual exposure if it has the unintended effect of encouraging a greater overall level of sexual activity” (John Richens, John Imrie and Andrew Copas, “Condoms and seat belts: the parallels and the lessons,” The Lancet, Volume 355, Number 9201, 29 January 2000, 400-403).
Their findings are supported by other studies. In Canada, an Ontario Ministry of Health campaign to promote condoms by means of televised AIDS messages made respondents more inclined to use condoms but less inclined to avoid casual sexual partners (GLS Wilde, Target Risk, PDE Publications, 1994). A 1997 report published by IPPF indicates that the risk of contracting AIDS during so-called “protected sex” approaches 100 percent as the number of episodes of sexual intercourse increases. This is to say that, in the end, the “protection” offered by condoms is no protection at all (Willard Cates Jr., Medical Bulletin, International Planned Parenthood Federation, 1997; see also: “Contraceptive watch,” PRI Review, May June 1997, 13).
Dr. Richens et al conclude that while “the benefits of condom use to individuals exposed to HIV or sexually transmitted diseases are substantial and well-documented, . . . it is much harder to show that condom promotion has had significant impact on HIV epidemics.” They take safe-sex programs promoted by USAID, the United Nations, and other international organizations to task, saying that “they are not having much impact in most developing countries.”
The bottom line is this: By creating a false sense of security, the widespread distribution of condoms and other contraceptive devices encourages risky sexual behavior. This in turn increases exposure to sexually-transmitted diseases such as AIDS. The only sure protection against AIDS is chastity before and within a lifelong monogamous marital union. Of all people, Clinton should know better.
