EDITORIAL – Abstinence education not key to AIDS prevention

During his visit to Tanzania yesterday, President Bush announced plans to renew his global… During his visit to Tanzania yesterday, President Bush announced plans to renew his global AIDS program, which includes a provision that would allocate one-third of all prevention spending to abstinence education. Bush claims that his prevention program, called ABC – abstinence, be faithful and condoms – has proven successful in fighting the AIDS epidemic throughout the world. We think, however, that a program that concentrated efforts on promoting condom use, encouraging monogamy and giving comprehensive education on HIV and AIDS (not just how abstinence will prevent it) could prove even more successful in curbing the spread of HIV.

We aren’t denying the value of practicing abstinence before marriage or saying that it shouldn’t be part of the process in preventing HIV transmission. But it just doesn’t warrant one-third of all prevention funding.

It’s an unfortunate reality that in Africa, which is home to more than two-thirds of all people infected with HIV, according to the Associated Press, and other parts of the world where AIDS rates are unfortunately high that transmission isn’t always a direct result of consensual sex.

Many women are raped or feel that their positions in society limit their ability to say “no.” We aren’t condoning these practices, but we must be realistic. Even when they’re aware of the value in abstaining until marriage, in parts of the world – including the United States – it’s just not going to happen.

AIDS prevention needs to start, above anything else, with encouraging condom use. Condom use has proven effective in preventing the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as preventing pregnancies, which could transmit the virus from an infected mother to her child.

Additionally, we need to focus education efforts on promoting awareness. In many parts of Africa it’s culturally taboo to talk about AIDS: People don’t understand how the disease is spread, what its effects are and how it can be treated.

In many Western countries, there’s too much of a contrast between what’s morally right and what’s scientific. Practicing abstinence before marriage complies with traditional Christian, Western values, but it just isn’t a pragmatic all-in-one approach to preventing unplanned pregnancies and transmission of sexually transmitted diseases. To Bush’s credit, this program provides equal funding for condom distribution and efforts at promoting monogamy, but imagine the difference we could make if even half of the money allocated toward abstinence education was used to distribute more condoms or to fund education efforts that would teach the facts about AIDS.

The global HIV emergency is too pressing to get swept up in our own ethnocentric beliefs about what’s moral. Teaching safe sex has been proven to work, and every dollar allocated toward abstinence education is a dollar taken away from promoting safe sex.