December 30, 2008

AIDS and the Ideological Barrier: The Threat to “Sexual Liberation”

By Douglas A. Sylva, Ph.D.

Published in December 2008 Volume 33, Number 12 edition of the Ethics & Medics, a National Catholic Bioethics Center publication.

      There are the ordinary ideological influences on public health campaigns, and then there are the extraordinary ones. The international response to the AIDS epidemic has been hampered by both, making it the most ideologically tainted campaign in modern history.

     The most ordinary, in fact commonplace, influence is the desire to place one’s chosen cause above others by exaggerating the dimensions of the crisis. A representative statement in this vein comes from Dr. Peter Piot, head of the United Nation’s specialized agency on AIDS, UNAIDS, who has said that the “the pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions.”(1)

     However, the agency’s numbers belie its leader’s claims. Only one year after Piot made his dire claim, UNAIDS announced that there were thirty-three rather than forty million people infected worldwide, and that the number of new infections had peaked almost ten years earlier.(2)

     According to the UN, this enormous revision was akin to a simple bookkeeping adjustment. Perhaps. But the studies UNAIDS conducted over the years to establish their estimates were plainly flawed. The UN tested patients at urban sexual health clinics—people who had reason to fear that they were infected—and then extrapolated the findings to the general population.(3) This would be like estimating a nation’s lung cancer rate by testing only chain smokers. Of course the numbers would be too high.

     There were a few people who knew this all along and spoke up, including Harvard University scientist Edward Green. In 2003, Green accused the UN of attempting to create an impression of worldwide catastrophe in order to keep the funding flowing (the UN administers about ten billion dollars a year on AIDS). By now, Green’s point is becoming more widely accepted; last year the New York Times admitted that, “in the past, global health officials have treated the epidemic as a cyclone spiraling ever upward with no end to new infections in sight.”(4)

     But this is just the start; this ordinary deviation from sound thinking in the case of AIDS is joined by the extraordinary: AIDS is unique because, as a deadly pandemic spread mainly through promiscuous sexual activity, it threatens some of the most cherished modern norms concerning sexual liberation. So to promote the most obvious response to such a pandemic—do not engage in promiscuous sexual activity—would in essence be a capitulation, an admission that the dream of consequence-free sexual activity was not only impossible, but perhaps at least partly responsible for the scourge.(5)


Condom as Technological Solution

     Enter the lowly condom. As an alternative to a sound and sensible risk avoidance strategy, the international community found the only readily available device that held out some promise of risk reduction, of lessening the risk of infection caused by promiscuous sexual activity. The United Nations launched a massive, worldwide, comprehensive sex education and condom distribution campaign. It has been joined by just about every other institution involved in international development: the European Union, individual nations, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations. This, despite the fact that any significant level of protection would require condoms to be available in their billions, at all possible times and at all possible places, to be used 100 percent of the time, and to be used correctly 100 percent of the time. Nonetheless, condoms and their many imperfections were sold to the people of the developing world as “safe sex.”(6) The nations that embraced this program most emphatically, such as South Africa, saw infection rates continue to soar.

     At the same time, a few nations promoted traditional sexual morality—abstinence and fidelity—and they succeeded. These success stories were in turn undermined by the very international AIDS community charged with ridding the world of the disease. The victory in the Philippines, for example, was acknowledged by UNAIDS’ own research: “The Philippines remains a low HIV prevalence country [0.01 percent]. ... The number of HIV/AIDS cases is not expected to increase substantially over the next few years” (emphasis added).(7) The New York Times even admitted that the victory was because of traditional sexual morality: in the Philippines, “a very low rate of condom use and a very low rate of HIV infection seem to be going hand in hand. AIDS-prevention efforts often focus on condoms, but they are not widely available here—and are mostly shunned—in this conservative Roman Catholic country.”(8)

     But, despite all of this, UNAIDS announced to the world that there was the “potential for an explosion” of AIDS in the Philippines.(9) Why? It seems that the UN could not admit to a success that would create an alternative to the “safe sex” program. So what did the UN do? It flooded the nation with condoms, thereby encouraging the very behavior that leads to infection.

     The world’s AIDS epidemic has been used as a cudgel against Christianity, especially the Catholic Church. The Church’s stance against condoms allows the failure of the international safe sex campaign to be blamed on the Church, as the institution that has thwarted an otherwise good campaign. A columnist for the New Statesman newspaper eulogized Pope John Paul II, for example, by claiming that he “probably contributed more to the continental spread of the disease [in Africa] than the trucking industry and prostitution combined.”(10)

     AIDS has also been used as an excuse to ensconce the norms of the sexual revolution in international law, and to establish these norms as new universal rights. The UN has claimed that AIDS is spread because of a lack of human rights recognition for “vulnerable” populations—women, prostitutes, and “men who have sex with men.”(11) This has in essence moved AIDS above normal public health concerns.

Advancing the Sexual Revolution

     For years the UN and the European Union have been attempting to elevate the status of a UN document called “­International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights,” which suggests that, unless all national laws pertaining to sexuality are transformed (which in reality means that unless the sexual revolution is unleashed even further), AIDS cannot be defeated.

     The “International Guidelines” ultimately calls for complete sexual freedom: “Criminal law prohibiting sexual acts (including adultery, sodomy, fornication and commercial sexual encounters) between consenting adults in private should be reviewed, with the aim of repeal.” It suggests that contraceptives should be available everywhere and that abortion on demand should be legal for every woman. The document also calls for the international legalization of homosexual marriage as well as a kind of universal hate-crimes law for anyone who might oppose homosexuality: “These measures should include providing penalties for vilification of people who engage in same-sex relationships.”(12)

     From all of this, it is clear that the leaders of the international AIDS community have considered the disease a profound threat to the ideology of the sexual revolution, and have at times put both the protection and promotion of this ideology ahead of public health.

Footnotes:
1. Peter Piot, Foreword to UNAIDS, “2006 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic,” ix, http://data.unaids.org/pub/Global Report/2006/2006_GR_CH00FM_en.pdf.

2. Craig Timber, “UN to Cut Estimate of AIDS Epidemic: Population with Virus Overstated by Millions,” Washington Post, ­November 20, 2007, A01.

3. Ibid.

4. Donald G. McNeil Jr., “UN to Say It Overstated HIV Case by Millions,” New York Times, November 20, 2007.

5. Edward C. Green, Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Learning from Successes in Developing Countries: (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 66–21.

6. Ibid., 93–124.

7. UNAIDS/WHO, “Epidemiological Fact Sheets on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections: Philippines—2004 update,” http://data.unaids.org/Publications/Fact-Sheets01/philippines_EN.pdf.

8. Seth Mydans, “Low Rate of AIDS Virus in Philippines Is a Puzzle,” New York Times, April 20, 2003.

9. Jonathan Cohen, “The Philippines Unprotected: Sex, Condoms, and the Human Right to Health,” Human Rights Watch 16.6 (May 2004): 14.

10. Michela Wrong, “Blood of Innocents on His Hands,” New Statesman, April 11, 2005.

11. UNAIDS, “International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights: 2006 Consolidated Version,” http://data.unaids.org/­Publications/IRC-pub07/jc1252-internguidelines_en.pdf.

12. Ibid., 36.

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