December 22, 2005
DOWN-LOW DIRECTIVE
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TOBIAS: His office ordered earmark |
Advocates at Housing Works and elsewhere were howling last week after the Baltimore Sun exposed a leaked document from the U.S. Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, which oversees money sent abroad as part of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
The document mandates that, in fiscal year 2006, two-thirds of all PEPFAR money directed toward efforts at preventing sexual transmission of HIV in Africa and elsewhere go to programs promoting abstinence or sexual fidelity—to the virtual exclusion of condoms or safer-sex skills.
"It is just completely outrageous and irresponsible that the administration continues to push abstinence programs abroad when there is no scientific evidence to back them, and when, in many PEPFAR countries, young women are often pressured or forced into marriage or sexual relations at an early age. Moreover, HIV is so prevalent in the general population of these countries that sexual fidelity is not necessarily a safeguard against HIV for anyone," said Housing Works CEO Charles King.
"What's most disgusting," he continued, "is that these earmarks and mandates are being driven not by science but by the powerful religious conservatives that the Bush administration is so beholden to."
The leak follows a long-known PEPFAR provision that one third of total prevention funds go toward abstinence programs. After the two-thirds earmark for sexual transmission was leaked to the Sun by an administration staffer critical of the administration's focus on abstinence, deputy global AIDS coordinator Mark Dybul told the paper that the sexual-transmission earmark would ensure that the overall one-third mandate was met.
But potentially much more than a third of all funds are being spent on abstinence programs because sexual-transmission programs make up the lion's share of prevention initiatives in many PEPFAR countries, according to Jodi Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, an international-health advocacy group that recently released this analysis of PEPFAR spending. "Let's get real," says Jacobson. "Sex is a part of life, but these people" pushing the administration to fund abstinence programs "can't stand the notion of anyone having sex, so the idea of condoms and safer sex is anathema to them."
NEXT STEPS
The leaked directive has added fuel to the fire of an increasingly vocal denunciation of abstinence-only funding that began during November's 4-day Washington, D.C., summit of the Campaign to End AIDS, when Housing Works, CHAMP and other groups organized highly visible protests against such abstinence-promoting groups as the Family Research Council and Concerned Women For America, as well as against the Bush administration itself.
According to King, continued direct action against entities promoting abstinence-only funding in the U.S. and abroad will make up a significant portion of HW's on-the-streets advocacy in 2006. "We can't stand by silently while the administration and its right-wing bedmates push policies that put people's lives at risk," he said. "And nothing holds their bogus policymaking to the harsh light of public scrutiny more effectively than shaming them at their front doors."
Jacobson hopes to work with other agencies in 2006 to mount a coordinated campaign to remove the abstinence earmark from federal legislation, perhaps with the support of such congressmembers as Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA) or Betty McCollum (D-MN), both of whom sit on the House International Relations Committee. "The global AIDS coordinator is fond of saying that these programs are decided by [people in the individual countries] and that they reflect what Africans want," she says. "If that were true, you wouldn't have an earmark in the first place."
Meanwhile, said Jacobson, she'll continue pressuring the global AIDS coordinator's office to "reinterpret this earmark as long as it is in existence—to make it truly more ABC than it is," she said, referring to the office's nominal support for the Ugandan approach to prevention urging people to practice Abstinence, Be faithful and use Condoms, all in equal measure.
Care to join CHANGE on either front? Contact Jacobson at jjacobson@genderhealth.org or 301.270.1182. We'll keep you posted in 2006 on efforts to reverse abstinence-only funding.