Is Condom Distribution Smart Health Policy?

Recommend (1) Comments (3)

As it happens, the Catholic Church is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else in the world, and it’s quite clear from the evidence that the faith is offering more than salvation in Christ; it is also sewing hope for an AIDS-free future—and practical methods for achieving it. Thinking of the Biblical parable of the sower, it’s obvious that the traditional Christian teaching about sex will not always fall on fertile ground. But where it does, it’s apparently the only thing that works well to hold back the HIV plague.

This will not, I know, sit well with most westerners, for whom the thought of sexual restraint and “old-fashioned” morality is farcical. Back in 2003, as Dr. Green wrote recently in the Washington Post, a United Nations study by Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen of the University of California showed that condoms are not a “primary HIV-prevention measure in Africa.” The “progressive” UN ignored the results—even “disowned” the report. A May 2008 article in the journal Science came to the candid conclusion that public-health efforts to encourage condom use in Africa simply don’t work—a fact made more compelling by the success of faith-based approaches. Others researchers have suggested that condom distribution may encourage sexual profligacy by giving people a false sense of invulnerability, which would give support to the pope’s point: “[I]f Africans do not help one another,” he told reporters on the Alitalia charter, “the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem.”

Dr. Green describes what has actually worked in Africa: “Strategies that break up . . . multiple and concurrent sexual networks -- or, in plain language, faithful mutual monogamy or at least reduction in numbers of partners, especially concurrent ones.”
That’s not an endorsement of a “theology of the body,” and Dr. Green himself remains pro-condom, but it does indicate why the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the pope’s comments was off-base. (Thousands of Facebook users have pledged to send condoms to the Vatican—a sophomorically pointless a gesture if there ever was one.)

Why not admit the obvious: Americans, Europeans, Asians, and, yes, Africans who have loving, monogamous relationships—which are good for the couples, good for their countries, and very good for their children—are unlikely to acquire HIV or any other STD. They’re also more likely to be happy. And for this the Facebookers call the pope “narrow-minded, bigoted and irresponsible”?

Let me ask them: What hope do you have to offer to Africa?