December 2-8, 2007 Issue |
Posted 11/27/07 at 3:39 PM
Irene Mirembe has found what the whole world is looking for:
A nearly 100% effective way of preventing AIDS. She’s a 24-year-old who lives
in Kampala, Uganda.
She spoke with Sue Ellin Browder in this issue’s excellent front-page
story about AIDS.
Stories like this one can create a false picture. In order
to thoroughly cover the subject matter, we have to look very carefully at
exactly how effective condom promotion efforts are at promoting condoms, and
how effective condoms are at stopping AIDS.
We follow the Register’s journalistic philosophy and try to
present the most effective argument against the Church, and then answer it.
But Irene’s life points to the deeper reason Catholics reject condoms, apart from issues of effectiveness.
“All my life I knew my dad would one day die of AIDS,” she
told us. “He wasn’t faithful. I told him to stop going out with other women. He
never listened to me. He got the virus in 1995 and died in May, 2003.”
Soon, Irene was an AIDS orphan.
When we think of the AIDS epidemic, we think of the numbers
— big numbers — of those affected. Irene thinks of her father’s last days.
“In the end, he could no longer toilet himself,” she said.
“You had to clean him up. You had to feed him. He was the only breadwinner.
Every day we became poorer and poorer.”
The information Browder provides you about condoms in
today’s story is key. But Irene’s lesson is more fundamental.
“If sex is not in a marriage, it has an impact on everyone
in the family,” she told Browder. “Before my father died, we were tired of him.
It has taken me a long time to forgive him.”
The facts that Browder collected bear out the principle that sex
should stay in marriage. She talked to Edward Green, director of the AIDS
Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and
Development Studies.
She also spoke with Norman Hearst, a family physician and
epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
These secular experts say that in many places condom
promotion actually increases AIDS.
Green wrote Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Learning from
Successes in Developing Countries. He reported that, between 1989 and 2001, the
average number of condoms per male ages 15 to 49 in African countries
skyrocketed. So did the number of those infected with HIV. South Africa,
Botswana and Zimbabwe had the world’s highest levels of condom availability per
man. They also had the world’s highest HIV rates.
UNAIDS asked Hearst to do a scientific review to see if
condom promotions had reversed HIV/AIDS epidemics. His review found the
contrary was true. Countries with the most condoms per man tended to have the
highest HIV rates. UNAIDS refused to publish Hearst’s findings.
“Condom promotion in Africa has been a disaster,” Hearst
said.
The only thing that ever worked against Africa’s epidemic
was Uganda’s “ABC” message, which stressed abstinence and fidelity. The message
was to abstain and be faithful before resorting to condoms. It was drummed into
the population through a number of media. Uganda’s HIV infection rates dropped
by more than two-thirds.
As HIV dropped in the Karamoja district of Uganda, less than
1% of the population reported using condoms — the success against the disease
came from sexual continence.
Again, though, Irene’s personal story points to the deeper
issue. After her mother also died of AIDS, Irene had sex with several men — and
that only reinforced what she had learned.
“I used condoms, but condoms didn’t protect my heart. Now
I’m keeping myself for marriage. It’s definitely possible to live without sex,”
she said. “Now there’s a freedom in my mind, a freedom in my
heart.”
The truth is, AIDS is an unnecessary epidemic. Not only is
it preventable but the lifestyle it takes to prevent it — abstinence outside of
marriage — is also the only lifestyle that brings true happiness and real
fulfillment.
We already know how to prevent AIDS. God provided the answer
millennia ago in the Sixth Commandment. Condom promotions have only increased
the numbers of dead.
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