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Liberals Target Uganda’s HIV-Prevention Efforts
by Aaron Atwood, assistant editor Campaign launched to dissuade African nation from its abstinence-first sex education policy, despite irrefutable evidence of its success.
A left-leaning sexual health organization has targeted Uganda’s abstinence-first sex education program for protest, despite overwhelming evidence that the strategy has greatly cut the number of HIV/AIDS infections in the African nation.
Advocates for Youth, as part of a campaign called “My Voice Counts,” is asking its members and supporters to contact key Ugandan health and government officials and urge them to more fully embrace condoms and other forms of birth control.
“There is no evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs work,” the Advocates for Youth Web site states, adding that support must be given to “science-based HIV prevention strategies” rather than “ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.”
Peter Brandt, senior director of government and public policy at Focus on the Family Action, said the group is flatly misstating reality in order to promote its condoms-first agenda.
“What the studies bear out is that abstinence works every time in preventing the spread of HIV and all other sexually transmitted diseases,” he said. “Condoms aren’t a solution to the problem of young people dying; they’re a politically correct cause for those on the political left.”
Consider the evidence: Uganda once had the highest HIV-infection rates in the world—30 percent in some regions. But through the government’s strong abstinence policy, rates have plummeted—from 21.2 percent among pregnant women in 1991 to 6.1 percent in 2001.
The general population has seen a decline, as well, to around 7 percent. And that number figures to drop further, since studies show a third of Ugandan college students are keeping their abstinence pledges.
The evidence has led Dr. Edward C. Green of the Harvard School of Public Health to state unequivocally that the success of Uganda’s HIV-prevention policy is in its stressing of abstinence until and fidelity within marriage. Condoms are only mentioned as a third option, for those who don’t practice the first two strategies.
“Few in public health circles really believed—or even believe nowadays—that programs promoting abstinence, fidelity or monogamy, or even reduction in number of sexual partners, pay off in significant behavioral change,” Green wrote in a recent analysis of Uganda’s sex-education efforts. “My own view of this changed when I evaluated HIV prevention programs in Uganda and Jamaica.”
Even University of California professor Norman Hearst—a medical doctor who’s studied AIDS among homosexuals in San Francisco and in African populations—has said that Uganda is “the one country . . . that did not rely primarily on condoms” in its sex-education efforts.
“The experts, people like me, I guess, thought they were crazy and, in fact, they were right,” he told Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine. “Their approach worked better than the mainly condom approach.”
Still, he added, “a lot of the people in the field think this whole thing is some sort of smokescreen for the religious right that’s just trying to stop them from handing out condoms.”
That’s preposterous, Brandt said.
“Abstinence isn’t a smokescreen for anything,” he said. “It’s a strategy that saves lives—and Uganda is irrefutable truth of that.”
TAKE ACTION
Please take a moment to let Jim Muhwezi, Uganda’s minister of health, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose department is responsible for carrying out America’s global AIDS policy, know that only abstinence succeeds every time in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS.
family.org/cforum/news/a0037710.cfm
by Aaron Atwood, assistant editor Campaign launched to dissuade African nation from its abstinence-first sex education policy, despite irrefutable evidence of its success.
A left-leaning sexual health organization has targeted Uganda’s abstinence-first sex education program for protest, despite overwhelming evidence that the strategy has greatly cut the number of HIV/AIDS infections in the African nation.
Advocates for Youth, as part of a campaign called “My Voice Counts,” is asking its members and supporters to contact key Ugandan health and government officials and urge them to more fully embrace condoms and other forms of birth control.
“There is no evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs work,” the Advocates for Youth Web site states, adding that support must be given to “science-based HIV prevention strategies” rather than “ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.”
Peter Brandt, senior director of government and public policy at Focus on the Family Action, said the group is flatly misstating reality in order to promote its condoms-first agenda.
“What the studies bear out is that abstinence works every time in preventing the spread of HIV and all other sexually transmitted diseases,” he said. “Condoms aren’t a solution to the problem of young people dying; they’re a politically correct cause for those on the political left.”
Consider the evidence: Uganda once had the highest HIV-infection rates in the world—30 percent in some regions. But through the government’s strong abstinence policy, rates have plummeted—from 21.2 percent among pregnant women in 1991 to 6.1 percent in 2001.
The general population has seen a decline, as well, to around 7 percent. And that number figures to drop further, since studies show a third of Ugandan college students are keeping their abstinence pledges.
The evidence has led Dr. Edward C. Green of the Harvard School of Public Health to state unequivocally that the success of Uganda’s HIV-prevention policy is in its stressing of abstinence until and fidelity within marriage. Condoms are only mentioned as a third option, for those who don’t practice the first two strategies.
“Few in public health circles really believed—or even believe nowadays—that programs promoting abstinence, fidelity or monogamy, or even reduction in number of sexual partners, pay off in significant behavioral change,” Green wrote in a recent analysis of Uganda’s sex-education efforts. “My own view of this changed when I evaluated HIV prevention programs in Uganda and Jamaica.”
Even University of California professor Norman Hearst—a medical doctor who’s studied AIDS among homosexuals in San Francisco and in African populations—has said that Uganda is “the one country . . . that did not rely primarily on condoms” in its sex-education efforts.
“The experts, people like me, I guess, thought they were crazy and, in fact, they were right,” he told Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine. “Their approach worked better than the mainly condom approach.”
Still, he added, “a lot of the people in the field think this whole thing is some sort of smokescreen for the religious right that’s just trying to stop them from handing out condoms.”
That’s preposterous, Brandt said.
“Abstinence isn’t a smokescreen for anything,” he said. “It’s a strategy that saves lives—and Uganda is irrefutable truth of that.”
TAKE ACTION
Please take a moment to let Jim Muhwezi, Uganda’s minister of health, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose department is responsible for carrying out America’s global AIDS policy, know that only abstinence succeeds every time in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS.
family.org/cforum/news/a0037710.cfm
