The Associated Press

President Bush, who is in Africa this week, is pushing Congress to renew his AIDS initiative.

Featured Topic | Posted 28 weeks 3 days ago

Does abstinence education help spread AIDS?

President Bush this week implored Congress to renew his five-year, $30 billion global plan for AIDS relief -- including a core provision requiring that one-third of government spending go toward abstinence education.

Congress strongly supports the program generally, but many Democrats oppose the abstinence education requirement, saying it doesn't work. But the administration points to successes in stemming the spread of AIDS in sub-Sahara Africa.

Is abstinence enough? Should U.S. taxpayers be funding controversial abstinence education programs abroad? Does spending billions of dollars on AIDS prevention undermine other medical research and health care programs?

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Ben likes: This is compassion

National Review

“Compassionate conservatism” has been justly maligned, but it may yet leave one lasting and worthy legacy.

That would be the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), begun in 2003, which George W. Bush asked Congress to extend for another five years. Funding for AIDS prevention and treatment has seen a spectacular rise under PEPFAR. While spending on global AIDS relief hovered just short of $1 billion annually during Bill Clinton’s last years in office, the Bush administration has tripled that amount, spending an average of $3 billion per year since PEPFAR began. Under the proposal announced last Wednesday, that figure would double to $6 billion per year from 2008 to 2012. This is, as the president noted Wednesday, “unprecedented -- the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.”

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Joel likes: Abstinence fixation holds up Global AIDS bill

Sarah Posner/The American Prospect

The late Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who until his recent death was chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, lambasted the PEPFAR opponents a short time before he died. He cited studies that "found that the abstinence-only earmark has forced a reduction in programs preventing transmission of the virus that causes AIDS from mother to child, has reduced prevention efforts with high-risk groups, and has undermined efforts to implement [prevention] programs."

With regard to the opposition to the integration of HIV/AIDS and birth control services, Lantos added, "this provision will ensure contraceptive assistance to HIV-positive women who wish to delay or prevent a subsequent pregnancy. Do the people objecting to this provision want to stand in the way of a sick woman trying to avoid getting pregnant?"

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Al Franken letters to Neocons on Abstinence

Submitted on February 21st, 2008 by Anonymous

From Wikipedia:

In June 2003, Franken wrote a satirical letter to then Attorney General John Ashcroft in which he asked Ashcroft to be a role model for the youth of America by sharing "a moment when you were tempted to have sex, but were able to overcome your urges through willpower and strength of character." Franken proposed including the contribution in a book he claimed to be writing called Savin' It!. The following month Franken explained that the subject matter of his book and the purpose of his abstinence letter to the Attorney General were in fact satirical, and apologized for "any discomfort" caused to conservative leaders, stating that they would receive a letter of apology.

The reason for their "discomfort" was obviously that none of them had waited until marriage either. Typical hypocrites pushing policy that they themselves didn't even follow - just to please the base. What a joke, and it gets people killed.

Abstinence doesn't work.

Submitted on February 21st, 2008 by Anonymous

In spite of abstinence campaigns, many young Ugandans, even those in schools, live active sex lives, and others, especially girls are subjected to premarital sex by older men. Many girls and women, especially in war and conflict areas are forced or enticed into sex with no choice or power to abstain or be faithful. The high rates of teenage pregnancies say it all. So by declaring war on distribution of condoms among the youth disposes many Ugandans to risks of infection. Although it is good to encourage the youth to abstain until marriage, adoring very moralistic approaches is to pretend that we are not in a secular world and demonstrate our inability to learn from other parts of the world.

It is our responsibility to improve knowledge and effectiveness of condom use in the face of limited options rather than compromise vulnerable groups in the ideal “non-condomised” but HIV/AIDS infected world.

Turning condom use into a moral issue makes no provision for people living with HIV/AIDS who for the past decades have made condom use part and parcel of their sex lives for purposes of protection against re-infection and infecting others (positive prevention). Faithful and discordant partners use condoms as family planning and prevention measures respectively. They should not be portrayed as social deviants and judged as morally wrong. Such statements only reinforce social stigma, discrimination, denial, fear and silence in the general community. Stigma does not only hurt those suffering from the disease but cause more people to get infected.