September 14, 2006
DYBUL CONFUSES ABSTINENCE WITH GENDER EQUITY
On Wednesday at a House Committee on Government Reform subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations hearing, the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Mark Dybul, and other HIV/AIDS officials added a new step in their on-going dance to defend the U.S. global AIDS strategy. Acknowledging that women are increasingly at the center of the pandemic, Dybul claimed that the Administration's ideologically driven program that focuses on promoting abstinence until marriage and faithfulness in marriage "might be the best way to encourage men to treat women better."
Yet just last month, Dybul made appearances at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto where people from around the world made it quite clear that women and girls need comprehensive education, access to condoms, and educational and economic opportunities to survive the AIDS pandemic. To actually eradicate AIDS, we must eradicate gender inequity. Waiting until marriage to have sex and telling men not to mess around neither protects women in the short term nor solves the root issues, and the global community knows it. At the mere mention of the Bush Administration's program of abstinence and faithfulness promotion, thousands of attendees rumbled to life to boo Bill Gates during his opening remarks.
"Speaking as a woman activist, as a woman who abstained, as a woman who was faithful when I got married but still got HIV," Beatrice Were, an HIV-positive woman from Uganda led a panel discussion reviewing the evidence against the Bush Administration's program. An activist with ActionAid Uganda and co-founder of the National Community of Women Living With AIDS (NACWOLA), she explained how the U.S. priorities have increased the proportion of Ugandan AIDS-prevention funding going to activities promoting abstinence and fidelity from 50% in 2004 to 60% in the last year alone. She also says that the money is now going to "moralistic faith groups that bad-mouth the condom."
Ugandans are not the only people to suffer from the U.S. government's censorship of AIDS information. The word on the worldwide street is that some groups funded by the U.S. undermine condom use, primarily through abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.
At Wednesday's hearing in Washington, however, advocates questioned even broader impacts of an earmark for abstinence promotion. Women's rights advocate Ellen Marshall, blogging for RhReality Check, explained, "While trying to investigate the impact of the abstinence-only-until-marriage earmark, part of the hearing degraded into a debate of A v. C. Ab-only proponents resorted to arguing on behalf of abstinence programming because they do not have a good reason for why one-third of prevention funding needs to be directed to such efforts. We need to critically evaluate the programming that is undertaken to prevent the spread of HIV to ensure that we get every bit of value from the tax dollars we are investing. We also need to do it to save people's lives."
Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) has created an alternative to the deadly narrow abstain and be faithful approach (which, incidentally, has already failed miserably here in the U.S.. The PATHWAY Act of 2006 (Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women and Youth Act of 2006), which would require a comprehensive and integrated strategy to address the vulnerabilities of women and girls to HIV infection, now has more than 70 Congressional Cosponsors and more than 70 national, state and local endorsing organizations. To support the bill, visit www.PEPFARWatch.org.
For full transcripts of the hearing, visit the Committee on Government Reform.