...
After the old argument was fired against Pope Benedict XVI in his last trip to Africa, I tried to argue that pro-condom arguments are stupid and to demonstrate that research shows condoms promotions make AIDS worse, but I’m afraid that none of that phases condom promoters.
It’s like condom promoters are in the grip of some kind of insanity. And ultimately, the only hope you have for someone in the grips of insanity is to hold up a mirror and hope they recoil in horror from what they see.
Perhaps this “Bet Their Lives!” ad campaign can serve as a kind of mirror. It works even if “betting their lives” just means their health, their plans, their hopes, their relationships, or their emotional and spiritual wellness.
First: A reminder that condom use is entirely dependent on the responsibility of those who are supposed to use them. And who (in the first year of sexual activity, anyway) usually don’t.
Second: A reminder that kids, when they are out having fun, for instance with friends in their car, tend to behave even less responsibly. The heat of passion doesn’t improve their reflectiveness.
Third: A reminder that we as a society normally understand the value of attaching taboos to dangerous behaviors, even when we know a significant number of kids will still push the envelope.
Fourth: A reminder to parents that when that little voice whispers “You don’t have to worry about your kids. They’re special!” you should ignore that voice.
Fifth and last: another appeal to common sense.
Who knew that the intractable global problems of “overpopulation,” poverty, carbon emissions, climate change, deforestation, civil wars, unplanned pregnancies, and abortions could all be solved by the simple expedient of more birth control? Nicholas Kristof, for one.
He proposed this solution in a New York Times column that will likely be studied by journalism students for decades—as an example of what happens when the last Fact Checker at a “newspaper of record” is asleep on the job.
It took only a 30-second Google search to demolish Kristof’s principal thesis—that the birth of the world’s 7 billionth person is the result of too much unprotected sex that contributes to all these ills.
The 30-second search confirms that population growth is not fueled by an excess of babies, as Kristof contends; it is fueled by more folks living longer than ever. The demographic evidence comes straight from the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). Using UNPD data, a Population Reference Bureau demographer compared population trends in the 0-4 age group and the 65-and-over age group. For simplicity, I’ll refer to these groups as Toddlers and Elders. Here’s what the UN’s data show.
In 1950 there were 335 million Toddlers worldwide and only 131 million Elders. Due to very low birthrates in developed countries and declining birthrates in most developing countries, today Elders are rapidly closing the gap. After Toddlers peak at about 650 million, sometime between 2015 and 2020, “for the first time in history, the [number of Toddlers] will decline” while Elders keep growing in number, reaching 714 million in 2020. By 2050, there will be 2.5 times more Elders than Toddlers—a complete reversal of the 1950 demographics.
Greater longevity is a good thing—the result of scientific and technological breakthroughs in agriculture and nutrition, in medicine, in water purification, and in improved sanitation.
But it’s the Toddlers on whom the future of humanity depends. When they reach adulthood, they will join the workforce, contributing to the nation’s wealth and tax revenues for roughly four decades, revenues sorely needed to fund Social Security and Medicare. It’s the cohort of former Toddlers who’ll be buying the cars, homes, and pricey electronics that keep an economy humming.
It is only right to provide a safety net for the elderly poor, from pure compassion, as well as in recognition of their contributions and sacrifices. But countries in the European Union are already reeling from the crisis of having too few workers to sustain the cradle-to-grave welfare state, even as the number of retirees explodes. Demographically, America is not far behind.
A good Fact Checker might also have questioned Mr. Kristof’s faith in the theoretical modeling exercises of the Guttmacher Institute, which purport to show that an X increase in access to and use of contraception will reduce unplanned pregnancies by Y, and abortions by Z.
The evidence simply doesn’t back this up. Empirical data of the last fifty years overwhelmingly show that with increased access to and use of contraception, unplanned pregnancies and abortions very often rise, or at best, stay about the same (an exception being found among women in former Soviet bloc countries, whose lifetime abortions often numbered well into double digits). Guttmacher and others have published numerous papers describing this apparent paradox.
Spain provides a recent example of this phenomenon: Between 1997 and 2007, contraceptive use among women rose 63 percent, while the rate of elective abortion in Spain more than doubled (108 percent).
In Sweden, teen abortion rates dropped 40 percent between 1975 and 1985, and teen childbearing also fell. Later the government increased pregnancy prevention efforts—providing free contraceptive counseling, subsidized oral contraceptives (OCs) and condoms, and over-the-counter emergency contraceptives. Between 1995 and 2001, teen abortion rates in Sweden increased by almost one-third—from 17 to 22.5 per 1000.
Duke University economics professor Peter Arcidiacono writes: “Our results suggest that increasing access to contraception may actually increase long run pregnancy rates. … On the other hand, policies that decrease access to contraception, and hence sexual activity, may lower pregnancy rates in the long run.”
Key studies with full citations are summarized in a fact sheet titled “Greater Access to Contraception Does Not Reduce Abortions.”
Why do contraceptives fail to live up to their name and their advertising? Many factors contribute to lack of effectiveness in preventing pregnancies (and STDs), especially among teens: method and user errors, the phenomenon of “risk compensation,” age-related fertility, and frequency of intercourse. Guttmacher’s Family Planning Perspectives reports the following 12-month pregnancy rates for sexually active OC users: 3.3 percent for middle-income married women age 30 and above; 13 percent for low-income single teens; and 48.4 percent for low-income cohabiting teens.
Among sexually active women whose partners use condoms as their primary method of birth control, 12-month pregnancy rates are as follows: 6.2 percent for middle-income married women age 30 and above; 23.2 percent for low-income single teens; and 72 percent for low-income cohabiting teens.
If it were just a matter of hormonal birth control not being 100-percent foolproof, and putting aside the moral questions involved in casual and contraceptive sex, some might argue for its use by disciplined, meticulous adults, in a stable relationship, willing and financially able to raise the potential “unplanned” baby.
Hormonal contraceptives are not benign, however, as any Fact Checker would learn from drug labels on the FDA’s website (even without perusing the voluminous Adverse Events data).
The link between hormonal contraceptives and breast cancer has been known for over thirty years. The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies the synthetic estrogen and progestin in contraceptives as carcinogenic to humans. The largest metanalysis (54 studies with over 150,000 women) found that women who use OCs before age 20 have almost double the risk of developing breast cancer before age 30, compared to women who did not use OCs as teens.
Until 2002, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), using hormones similar to those in combined OCs, but in lower doses, was standard treatment for menopausal symptoms. As HRT use increased, breast cancer rates rose by over 40 percent from the early 1980s through 2001. In 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative HRT trials were abruptly halted due to findings of increased risks of breast cancer, heart disease, blood clots, and stroke. As prescriptions plummeted, breast cancer rates in women over age 50 dropped 8.6 percent between 2001 and 2004. WHO now classifies HRT as carcinogenic in humans.
A Fact Checker could have told Mr. Kristof that there is, in fact, a way to slightly reduce population growth through contraceptive use, but not what he had in mind: Contraceptives can kill adults and teens.
In addition to having an increased risk of dying from breast cancer, women using hormonal contraceptives and their partners are dying at higher rates from incurable STDs, like HIV/AIDS, because hormonal contraceptives can double the risk of STD acquisition.
Women continue to die from high levels of synthetic hormones. For example, about 130 deaths have been linked to the Ortho Evra patch from blood clots resulting in heart attack, stroke, or pulmonary embolism.
Three new studies show a higher risk of lethal blood clots or gallbladder disease in women using birth control pills like Yaz. The manufacturer, Bayer, is already facing “6,850 lawsuits alleging that Yaz’s drospirenone ingredient is more dangerous than those used in competing pills. About 190 deaths from heart attack, stroke or pulmonary embolism have been associated with Yaz and similar pills.”
The manufacturer of NuvaRing® now faces 730 lawsuits in the U.S. for blood clot-related injuries and deaths associated with its use. About 40 deaths linked to NuvaRing® use have been identified to date in the FDA adverse event database.
A good Fact Checker could have given Mr. Kristof these hard truths and spared him from looking foolish. But where are all the good Fact Checkers when you need them? Not at The New York Times.
Susan E. Wills, Esq., is assistant director for education and outreach at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities.
August 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Our children are under attack by an insidious and virulent enemy.
On August 17, 2011, more than 50 activists attended a conference for “minor-attracted adults,” i.e., pedophiles, which sought to eliminate the “stigma” attached to pedophilia and to redefine pedophilia as a normal “sexual orientation.” The United States Department of Justice has determined that 64 percent of forcible sodomy victims are boys under the age of 12 and that 58,200 children were kidnapped by non-family members in 1999.
So-called “experts” in the field of human sexuality claim that children are sexual not only from birth, but even in the womb and are willing participants in sexual acts with adults.
Children are encouraged to experiment with sex early and often and to engage in sex with members of the same-sex as well as the opposite sex. Sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers are at epidemic proportions, and new and sometimes fatal strands of diseases are being reported. More than 50,000 teens have contracted HIV which has advanced to full blown AIDS and by 1992 more than 7,000 boys and 1,500 girls have died from HIV/AIDS.
How did we get here? How do we stop the madness before we lose an entire generation?
The question of how we got here can be answered by two words: Alfred Kinsey. Even 55 years after his death, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey continues to profoundly affect American culture. Two of his most ardent supporters, Dr. Carol Vance, Columbia University anthropologist and lesbian activist, and Dr. John Money, an “out” pedophile advocate and pioneer of transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins, have cogently summed up Dr. Kinsey’s legacy – a legacy they consider sexual “progress” but is in reality sexual anarchy.
Speaking at a 1998 Kinsey symposium of fellow sexologists at San Francisco State University, Dr. Vance said, “Biography is the battleground.”[1] Should Kinsey be discredited, she warned, “200 years of sexual progress can be undone.”
Dr. Vance’s statements echo comments made in 1981 by Dr. Money at the 5th World Congress of Sexology in Israel. They also agreed that the information contained in Table 34, below, and the other data chronicling Kinsey’s and his team’s widespread child abuse, described in detail in Kinsey’s 1948 study on male sexuality, would be the undoing of the “Pre and Post Kinsey eras” globally and in the USA.
In fact, Dr. John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute said at the 1998 conference, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kinsey’s studies, that he “prayed” that a British television program, “Secret History: Kinsey Paedophiles,” would never be shown in the United States because the public would not understand the “science” involved in Kinsey’s publication of tables 30-34. He understood that should those tables be widely publicized in the United States, then the whole field of human sexuality and human sex education would be destroyed.
This field of human sexuality and human sex education and 200 years of “sexual progress” that these elite “scientists” were so worried would be destroyed is better described as sexual anarchy. This sexual anarchy that has given these scientists and their followers prestige, money, credibility and control over the deconstruction of the Judeo-Christian civil society was crafted by Dr. Kinsey.
A gall-wasp zoologist at Indiana University from 1920 to his death in 1956, Dr. Kinsey is most famous for his earth-shaking books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)[2] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953),[3] funded by Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Kinsey said that his mission was to eliminate the sexually “repressive” legal and behavioral legacy of Judeo Christianity. He claimed that this “repressive” sexual legacy was responsible for socio-sexual ills like divorce, rape, illegitimacy, venereal disease, juvenile delinquency, promiscuity, homosexuality, adultery, and child sexual abuse.
Furthermore, he argued that if we Americans would admit that we really were engaged in widespread licentious conduct, instead of hypocritically denying it, then these socio-sexual ills would be dramatically reduced.
In large measure, Dr. Kinsey’s mission has been accomplished, mostly posthumously, by his legion of true believers–elitists who have systematically brainwashed their fellow intellectual elites to adopt Kinsey’s pan-sexual secular worldview and jettison the Judeo Christian worldview upon which this country was founded and flourished.
The result of Dr. Kinsey’s mission has been totally antithetical to the utopia he predicted. Instead of reducing the socio-sexual ills that he claimed were rampant in pre-Kinsey America, the implementation of the Kinsey worldview has increased extant global sexual trauma while ushering in a host of new ills that are objectively defined as sexual anarchy. Like a cancer spreading throughout the body, sexual anarchy has spread throughout the fabric of society, affecting every aspect of American life and every man, woman and child.
According to the Rockefeller-funded Kinsey “study,” his “science” proved that humans had all along been copulating like insects or monkeys but systematically and hypocritically lying about their conduct. Adults claimed they were virgins, or maritally faithful, but, according to Kinsey, the truth was that most people were promiscuous and the widespread promiscuity had done no harm to the civil society.
Therefore, Kinsey said, all of the laws restraining sexual behavior–the laws that had favored and protected women, children and the family for generations –were simply old-fashioned leftovers from an uninformed and hypocritical era. Such sex laws were no longer valid in a “sexually enlightened and honest era.”
Enter “Kinsey’s pamphleteer,” Hugh Hefner and his Playboy magazine. At Kinsey’s urging, the country’s laws were gutted to resemble the free love, free life style Kinsey alleged Americans were living all along, and could finally live out with a free and open spirit–no more lies or pretense. Thus the 1955 American Law Institute Model Penal Code jettisoned the “common law” sexual standards that were based upon Biblical authority/precedent for “scientific law” based on Kinsey’s allegedly “objective data.”
The ALI recommended laws trivializing rape and allowing fornication, cohabitation, sodomy and adultery. Shortly thereafter, fornication, cohabitation and adultery were decriminalized so that they would become common, normal, and harmless, as Kinsey said they had been all along. In 1957, the United States Department of Defense used Kinsey and his team to conclude that homosexuals do not pose a security risk.
The ALI also recommended changing the definition of obscenity, which the Supreme Court did in 1960. That same year Kinsey’s claim that 10% to 37% of the male population is at least sometimes homosexual was used to promote “gay rights” in elite professions, e.g., medicine, psychiatry, social work, education, etc.
In 1961, Illinois became the first state to legalize heterosexual sodomy. In 1962 Ralph Slovenko wrote in the Vanderbilt Law Review that four or five year olds are provocateurs: “Even at the age of four or five, this seductiveness may be so powerful as to overwhelm the adult into committing the offense.”
That same year, the United States Supreme Court declared prayer in public schools unconstitutional[4] and the following year declared that Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional.[5] The Judeo-Christian worldview was expunged from the classroom. Schools could no longer teach that fornication, adultery or cohabitation were illegal, nor could the health teachers imply that sex should be confined to marriage because that would reflect a “religious,” thus allegedly a non-scientific, worldview.
The only avenue remaining for the teaching of human reproduction was the “scientific,” i.e., Kinseyan, secular worldview.
By 1968 over 51,000 sex professionals had been trained by the unaccredited IASHS (Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality) to teach Kinseyan sexuality in schools and medical schools and to design school sex education curricula. In 1975, the IASHS began to accredit sex educators in “safe sex” through the Ph.D. level.
Contraception became a necessity in the face of the radical changes in the sexual landscape, and so it was legalized in 1965.[6]
As evidence of lack of “consent” became the only criteria for sex crimes, alleged rape victims were commonly challenged as “liking” the rough sex and as consenting to the sexual activity. Prostitution and rape were increasingly referred to as “victimless crimes” in the courts and in the media.
Thus, the right to have sex for ‘fun’ and profit became the justification for a sex industry, inaugurated by Kinsey’s publicist, Hugh Hefner, that includes child and adult pornography, exhibitionism, prostitution and strip clubs, to name a few. That industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar market, giving its purveyors the resources and clout to negotiate grants to sexology research groups and organizations that create the sex education curricula for the nation’s schools, as well as access to lobbyists and, arguably, to state and federal legislators to continue to change the law to favor the sex industry’s interests.
Playboy, et. al also have funded Planned Parenthood, Sex Information & Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), the Kinsey Institute, and other “sexology” institutions. In 1967, Playboy provided the first of many grants to the ACLU to support drug use, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, school sex [mis]education and the elimination or reduction of sex offender penalties. Beginning in 1970, Playboy officially granted funds to NORML, the National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws.
The year 1969 brought about significant events related to the systematic effort to normalize homosexuality as championed by Kinsey 21 years earlier. The Gay Liberation Front was formed at the New York Alternative University. The American Sociological Association officially stated that homosexuality is normal, citing Kinsey’s “research.” The National Institutes of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality recommended legalizing private consensual homosexual acts (sodomy) citing to Kinsey’s “data.”[7] In 1972, the NIMH Task Force, led by Kinseyan disciples, urged that homosexuality be taught as a normal sexual variation in the nation’s schools.
“No fault” divorce was ushered in by California in 1970. By 1985, no fault divorce was the law in 49 states. This triggered a massive increase in the divorce rate and the impovertization of women and children, increasing the need for welfare and abortion, with the latter legalized in 1973.[8]
The absence of fathers in the home decreased the economic, social, emotional and spiritual home life, which triggered epidemic child sexual abuse, increased promiscuity, increased criminality–including rape and prostitution–increased venereal diseases and sterility in young women. With no father in the home, children were significantly more vulnerable to molestation by older children, which was redefined as “harmless” peer sex play by Kinsey. This “harmless” sex play led to increased rates of venereal disease, promiscuity, homosexual acting out and suicide.
These disorders then opened the door to additional, more virulent forms of mandated sex [mis]education couched as “pride” in one’s sexual “orientation,” anti-bullying, AIDS prevention and more instruction in “safe sex,” including mutual masturbation, oral and anal sodomy and viewing pornography.
By 1981 Dr. Mary Calderone, SIECUS president and past medical director of Planned Parenthood, took Kinsey one step further, asserting that children are sexual in the womb (Kinsey said children were sexual from birth).
Calderone announced that awareness of childhood sexuality was a primary goal of her organization. This set the “scientific” standard for distributing condoms to children nationwide. Therapeutic interventions were instituted to aid the now increasingly traumatized youth. Pharmocological intervention also increased, including mandated Hepatitis B vaccines for infants and HPV vaccines for elementary age children as STD “protections,” both of which were advocated in a 1977 “Child Rights” pedophile manifesto.
Hundreds of pages could be written on these issues and the additional fallout from Kinsey’s successful promiscuity propaganda that plummeted Reagan’s shining City on a Hill into a state of sexual anarchy.
We must focus now on how we stop the madness – not by ignoring the problem or by giving up in despair. God is on our side, just as He was on the side of those who founded this country. God used 56 God-fearing men to stand up to the largest imperial force in the free world and birth this great nation. He can use us to stand up against the current state of sexual anarchy, return this nation to our Judeo-Christian roots and rescue our children from the enemy who seeks to steal, kill and dstroy. As beneficiaries of God’s miraculous creation of these United States we cannot do anything less. Kinsey and his disciples at the Kinsey Institute have had more than 60 years to re-shape American culture. With Dr. Reisman’s decades of research we have the weapons to gain the upper hand, and we must band together to create the Judeo-Christian answer to the Kinsey Institute. We have the backing of the God of the universe. We can and must win this battle.
Notes:
1 - “Biography has become a battleground as moral conservatives like Dr. Judith Reisman strive to discredit
Alfred Kinsey in order to revisit another America era” warned Professor Carole Vance. Another infamous sexologist stated, “I have some problems, and I’m sure several of us do, with the use of the word “normal.” If you look at sexual abuse in children, the problem with defining it is, to what extent are we talking about aspects of behavior that we would call wrong….we don’t know really how harmful those experiences are….” (November 6, 1998, San Francisco State University seminar, “Kinsey At 50: Reflections On Changes In American Attitudes About Sexuality Half A Century After The Alfred Kinsey Studies,” lionizing Kinsey and addressing anarchist strategies for a new global sexual future).
2 - In the same year, Carnegie Foundation funds the ABA/ALI Legal Education Committee. Other pro-Kinsey books are published calling for sex law reforms and leniency for perpetrators.
3 - In that year, the Reece congressional committee was prohibited from investigating Kinsey’s data. Also, Planned Parenthood is founded in Washington, D.C.
4 - Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).
5 - Abington School District v. Schempp, 372 U.S. 203 (1963).
6 - Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (married couples), Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (unmarried couples).
7 - The Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of sodomy in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), but then overturned Bowers and found that homosexual sodomy could no longer be criminalized in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). Lawrence was based largely on the 1955 ALI Model Penal Code, which has been widely referred to as a Kinsey document.
8 - Roe v. Wade, 410 US 113 (1973). As Justice Kennedy noted in the Lawrence opinion, Griswold and Eisenstadt were part of the background for the opinion in Roe. Lawrence, 539 U.S. at 565. This illustrates how Kinsey’s legacy has permeated every aspect of society.
WASHINGTON, D.C., August 18, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has estimated that homosexual men account for 61% of the new HIV infections in the United States while they only amount to about 2% of the country’s population.
Earlier this month, the CDC released estimates for HIV infections from 2006-2009 showing that new infections remained stable at around 50,000 for each of the four years.
Homosexual men accounted for 29,300 of the estimated 48,100 new infections in 2009, and homosexual men aged 13 to 29 accounted for 27% of the new cases.
The only group in which new HIV infections is increasing, they say, is young homosexual men – driven by an alarming increase in infections from African Americans. They estimated that the new infections among young black homosexual men increased 48 percent in the period of 2006-2009 (from 4,400 HIV infections in 2006 to 6,500 infections in 2009).
The study also revealed that almost 20% of homosexual men have HIV, while nearly half of those who do are unaware of it.
For more information visit the CDC website here.
But there is a strange and disturbing trend now evident in the new cases of HIV/AIDS being reported, and it concerns women of reproductive age.
According to the most recent report of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, published in 2009, close to 50% of all newly acquired Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)-1 infections across the globe now occur in women of reproductive age. Only a decade before, in 1998, only roughly 36% of reported cases concerned women of all ages. Why this vast increase? Why, when treatment for HIV has become more accessible and the overall death toll has slowly been decreasing, are more and more women being infected? And why is the increase concentrated in women in their childbearing years?
Heterosexual intercourse is the point of transmission for the majority of these newly infected women. No surprise here. But sex is not just sex these days. Heavily funded population control programs have promoted, and even imposed, powerful, steroid-based contraceptive drugs on tens of millions of Third World women. What they trumpet as “greater global access to family planning methods” has in fact given the HIV virus greater access to women's bodies by altering women's local and systemic immunities, cervico-vaginal responses and protective vaginal flora—all in directions that make infection more likely.
Statistics gathered over the past 20 years reveal a parallel between an increase in contraceptive drug use and an increase in HIV-1 infections in women. Several epidemiological studies over the same period also seem to demonstrate a link. These studies were conducted with various cohorts of women from married mothers to single adolescents to “sex workers”, and were carried out, for the most part, among the populations of users of African family planning clinics. A link between the use of contraceptive drugs and HIV-1 disease acquisition and progression seemed evident, although most of the studies—for whatever reason—failed to draw any consistent or strong conclusions about this link. And none suggested that family planning programs ought to be modified or scaled back as a result.
One meta-analysis of 28 studies in 1999 suggested a positive association between oral contraceptives and HIV-1 incidence. A later study, however, carried out in 2006, claimed that there was no overall risk of acquiring HIV-1 as a result of such drug use. Such disparate results enable the promoters of population control programs to continue to rely on such contraceptive drugs, claiming, “the science is not settled.” Many of the organizations involved in such programs are, for obvious reasons, reluctant to offer clarity to women on the correlation between contraceptive use and HIV- disease prevalence in women. Indeed, several studies almost seem designed to deliberately obscure this fact.
Additional evidence of such a link comes from other studies that conclusively demonstrate that hormonal contraceptive use is positively associated with an increased risk of several other sexually transmitted infections (STI's) such as Chlamydia.
So why are the studies involving HIV-1 transmission so inconclusive? Reasons include poor controls on variables such as age and sexual lifestyle variants, infrequent assessment, lack of follow-up and widely varying contraceptive delivery methods. Attempts at rendering comparative data are difficult, and some of the statistical compilations and some of the meta-analytical efforts, seemed designed to serve population politics.
There are other lacunae as well. Few studies consider the different effects of estrogen and progesterone—and their synthetic steroid-based counterparts--on vaginal and cervical structure and immunity. The studies that have been done broadly compare “hormonal contraceptive” use to HIV-1 acquisition and progression across a diverse range of deliverables--oral, injectible, intra-uteral, etc.—that are lumped together under one generic “hormonal contraceptive” title. The most common such amalgamation, Combined Oral Contraceptives (COC's), consists of both hormonal (estrogen-like compounds) and steroidal (progestin) agents that work together to prevent ovulation, taken daily as “the pill.”
Other forms of contraceptive delivery include progestogen-only, such as the high-dose injectables Depo-Provera (DMPA) and Noristerat, moderate-dose pills, low-dose subdermal implants and laced intra-uterine devices (IUD's). These steroidal forms of preventing pregnancy affect the female reproductive system somewhat differently than their estrogen-like counterparts. In low-dose delivery regimens, progestins cause a thickening of cervical mucus inhibiting sperm viability and penetration. In high-dose delivery, cervico-vaginal changes also occur: follicular development is halted along with ovulation and the endometrium is thinned. The progestogen-only effects are clear: they weigh heavily on women's cervico-vaginal structure and protective flora, hence reducing a woman's ability to ward off infection. As far back as 1991 abnormal changes in the condition of the cervix was found to be strongly been associated with increased susceptibility to HIV/AIDS acquisition.
The chain of reasoning is straightforward: Women who take drug-based hormonal and steroidal contraceptives are at increased risk of STI's. HIV/AIDS is an STI. Therefore, women who take powerful steroid-based drugs called “hormonal contraceptives” are at increased risk of contracting the HIV virus.
It's time that researchers and policy makers faced these facts responsibly, for women's sake.
Mr President,
On the adoption of the declaration, the Holy See offers the following statement of interpretation. I would ask that the text of this statement, which explains the official position of the Holy See, kindly be included in the report of this high-level plenary of the General Assembly.
In providing more than one fourth of all care for those who are suffering from HIV and AIDS, Catholic healthcare institutions know well the importance of access to treatment, care and support for the millions of people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS.
The position of the Holy See on the expressions “sexual and reproductive health” and “services”, “reproductive rights” and on the Secretary-General’s Global Strategy on Women and Children’s Health is to be interpreted in terms of its reservations in the Report of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) of 1994. The position of the Holy See on the word “gender” and its various uses is to be interpreted in terms of its reservations in the Report of the Fourth World Conference on Women.
The Holy See understands that, when referring to “young people”, the definition of which enjoying no international consensus, States must always respect the responsibilities, rights and duties of parents to provide appropriate direction and guidance to their children, which includes having primary responsibility for the upbringing, development, and education of their children (cf. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Articles 5, 18, and 27,2). States must acknowledge that the family, based on marriage being the equal partnership between one man and one woman and the natural and fundamental group unit of society, is indispensable in the fight against HIV and AIDS for the airily is where children learn moral values to help them live in a responsible manner and where the greater part of care and support is provided (cf. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 16,3).
The Holy See rejects references to terms such as “populations at risk” and “populations at higher risk” because they treat persons as objects and can give the false impression that certain types of irresponsible behavior are somehow morally acceptable. The Holy See does not endorse the use of condoms/commodities as part of HIV and AIDS prevention programmes or classes/programmes of education in sex/sexuality. Prevention programmes or classes/programmes of education in human sexuality should focus not on trying to convince the world that risky and dangerous behaviour forms part of an acceptable lifestyle, but rather should focus on risk avoidance, which is ethically and empirically sound. The only safe and completely reliable method of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV is abstinence before marriage and respect and mutual fidelity within marriage, which is and must always be the foundation of any discussion of prevention and support.
The Holy See does not accept so-called “harm reduction” efforts related to drug use. Such efforts do not respect the dignity of those who are suffering from drug addiction as they do not treat or cure the sick person, but instead falsely suggest that they cannot break free from the cycle of addiction. Such persons must be provided the necessary spiritual, psychological and familial support to break free from the addictive behavior in order to restore their dignity and encourage social inclusion.
During negotiations, the Holy See rejected the characterization of persons who engage in prostitution as “sex workers” as this can give the false impression that prostitution could somehow be a legitimate form of work. Prostitution cannot be separated from the issue of the status and dignity of persons; governments and society must not accept such a dehumanization and objectification of persons.
What is needed is a value-based approach to counter the disease of HIV and AIDS, an approach which provides the necessary care and moral support for those infected and which promotes living in conformity with the norms of the natural moral order, an approach which respects fully the inherent dignity of the human person.
Thank you, Mr President.
The “conventional wisdom” prevalent in the United States, European Nations, and the United Nations is that the best way to prevent HIV/AIDS in Africa (or anywhere, for that matter) is to practice “safe sex,” that is, to make use of condoms and other prophylactic devises. The Catholic Church is regularly criticized for its failure to urge the use of condoms and “safe sex” in Africa and is blamed for the AIDS “epidemic” in sub-Sahara Africa.
A new book, Affirming Love, Avoiding Aids: What Africa Can Teach the West, [1] recently published by the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, challenges this widely shared view. The authors of the book are Matthew Hanley and Jokin de Irala. Hanley was the HIV/AIDS technical advisor for Catholic Relief Services until 2008 and specialized in HIV prevention. Dr. de Irala is deputy director of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Navarra in Spain. The book carries a Foreword by Edward C. Green, Director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. [2]
Brief Synopsis of Book
The book, Hanley and Irala say, first presents “the relevant scientific data and only then examine(s) the Christian and other philosophical approaches to HIV prevention” (p. 5). Here I will first summarize the “relevant scientific data” and then look at “the Christian and other philosophical approaches to HIV prevention.”
Relevant scientific data
Thomas Flynn, L.C., has provided an overview of this book in the June 27, 2010 edition of Zenit and in doing so summarizes the “relevant data.” I now paraphrase that summary:
Early in the book Hanley and de Irala point out that "AIDS Establishment" (=conventional wisdom of the west) has concentrated on technical means rather than on behavioral change. The exception to this was the change in policy by the United States to adopt an ABC strategy following the success of Uganda in using this approach to deal with AIDS. The "A" stands for abstinence, "B" for be faithful, and "C" for condom use. The first two parts to this strategy are crucial. In Africa studies show that when a significant number of people are engaged in concurrent sexual relationships the chances of infection are much higher compared to communities where people reduce multiple partnerships. A decline in multiple sexual partnerships is crucial to bringing about a decline in HIV rates. The best example of this was in Uganda, where HIV infection rates dropped from 15% in 1991 to 5% in 2001. Kenya, Thailand and Haiti are additional countries that the authors refer to in citing evidence from studies that show how behavioral change leads to a reduction in the rates of HIV transmission. One reason behind the success in modifying conduct in Uganda was the work of Catholic nuns and doctors. Unfortunately in recent years the AIDS establishment has gained influence in Uganda and the emphasis has shifted toward promoting the use of condoms. This has been accompanied by an increase in HIV transmission.
By contrast, in South Africa, where promotion of condom use has been the main priority, the persistently high rates of multiple partnerships has helped to maintain the level of HIV infections at what the authors describe as an “alarmingly high incidence.”
Christian and other philosophical approaches
Chapter VI of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS, is entitled “The Christian Perspective.” It is a very long chapter, running from p. 105 to p. 159, and it includes on pp. 153-159 some 92 footnotes. Pages 105-125 are devoted to a very excellent critique of the relativism, utilitarianism, and emotivism of the AIDS Establishment. They also fault its anthropological understanding of human sexuality, one common to that Establishment and widely accepted in Western cultures today. According to this anthropology, the “person” is a consciously experiencing subject and his/her body is a tool for giving that subject the experience of pleasure. In short, it separates the “person” from his or her own body. From page 126 on the authors refer to a wide range of thinkers, including the great pre-Christian philosophers, e.g. Aristotle (see p. 125), who reduced the hedonistic “man is the measure of all things” ethics to absurdity, defended the dignity of marriage, and proposed an alternative understanding both of morality and human anthropology, including human sexuality. Among contemporary authors to whom they refer include most prominently Pope John Paul II (with his great book Love and Responsibility) and Elizabeth Anscombe, whose philosophical work brilliantly showed the superficiality of utilitarianism-hedonism and showed how human is the practice of celibate chastity prior to marriage and the practice of total fidelity to one’s spouse in marriage. They also refer to and cite from the persuasive and thought-provoking work of Anthony Fisher, O.P., a distinguished bioethicist and now a Bishop in Australia.
The authors emphasize that human sexuality permeates the being of the entire human person and is integral to his being and is not a mere accident or useful tool. They likewise affirm that it is ordered to two great goods: the good of marriage and of chaste spousal union in the marital act, and to the good of procreating new human life. The latter good, one might say in company with Pope John Paul II, is an “existential good” insofar as the continued existence of the human species depends on the generation of new human persons. Many studies show that children thrive best if generated by loving husbands and wives than if engendered by persons who are not married or “made” in laboratories by “new reproductive technologies.”
Citing Rev. Tadeusz Pacholzyck on p. 41 they write that a husband who finds out he has HIV (perhaps as a result of a blood transfusion) will not, if he loves his wife, have genital sex with her nor would he trust a condom to protect her. [3]
They do not, however, in this chapter or elsewhere in their work, go into great detail in rehabilitating, as it were, the meaning of the virtue of chastity, which is, we need to keep in mind, an integral component of the cardinal virtue of temperance, whose other components are concerned with moderating our legitimate desires for food and drink.
Recently I directed a graduate study (S.T.L., or Licentiate in Sacred Theology, a canonical degree higher than an M.A. but not as high as a Ph.D.or S.T.D.) by a student, Andrew Amaruma, a native of Uganda, whose study showed that the tradition of the Madi tribe, to which he belonged, emphasized virginity prior to marriage for both males and female and fidelity in marriage. This tribe experienced little AIDS until, under pressure from the UN and USAIDS, it began to promote condom use and also to preach that consensual sex, whether between husband and wife, unmarried males and females, members of the same sex etc. was perfectly all right and that the traditional “taboos” against promiscuity were rooted in a false understanding of human sexuality and human needs.
This in my opinion shows how accurate Stephen Moser was in his Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, [4] in which Mosher shows (pp. 174-194) that the AIDS Establishment claim that the recent epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Africa is utterly without basis and that the real cause of most cases of AIDS is use of infected needles for injections, because funding of basic health care has tumbled while funding of antifertility programs has increased; injections by infected needles into women of contraceptives such as Dopo-Provera are among leading causes (pp. 174-194).