Kevin Dowling, a South African Catholic bishop, is hoping that the new pope will be different from the old one in at least one key way. That's because, according to the Baltimore Sun, someone dies of AIDS every other day in the hospice next to Dowling's home. In fact, in sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is the leading cause of death: Over 15 million people have died of AIDS there, including 2.3 million last year, the United Nations says. Another 25 million are infected.
In the rush of media adulation for the late Pope John Paul II, one issue was glossed over far too often. The fact is the pope's position on contraception was not just controversial -- it was often deadly. Indeed, said Michela Wrong in an April 11 article for England's New Statesman magazine, "the pope probably contributed more to the continental spread of the disease than the trucking industry and prostitution combined."
Few health experts dispute the fact that condom use prevents, to a large degree, the spread of AIDS. But when the epidemic currently destroying entire generations of Africans first hit, the Catholic Church stepped forward to say the exact opposite. In 1988, the late pope wrote that any use of condoms was, "intrinsically illicit. ... No personal or social circumstances could ever, can now or will ever render such an act lawful in itself." Kenya's Cardinal Maurice Otunga publicly burned condoms, while Raphael Ndingi Mwana'a Nzeki, the archbishop of Nairobi, suggested that condom use actually spread AIDS. And despite the World Health Organization's statements to the contrary, the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family said that HIV could pass through tiny holes in condoms, rendering them worthless for preventing the disease.
Only one country in sub-Saharan Africa, Uganda, has been successful in reducing its rate of HIV infection. In the early '90s, 30 percent of Ugandans were infected, according to avert.org, an international AIDS charity. At the end of 2003, only 4.1 percent of the country had the disease. Meanwhile, the United Nations reports, the rest of the region's infection rate has remained stable. The key difference between Uganda and the rest of the region? Sex education which emphasized that condoms could save lives. Today, though, those remarkable advances are being rolled back by a shift toward abstinence-only programs funded and encouraged by the United States, Human Rights Watch warns.
At home and abroad, the Bush administration has been pushing for sex education programs that teach only abstinence and leave out any mention of safe sex. And much as the Vatican's preaching of sexual health through abstinence alone has proven disastrous for millions of Catholics, abstinence-only education is hurting America's youth.
Since 1982, according to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, over a billion dollars has been spent on sex education programs that teach only abstinence until marriage. That funding is increasing rapidly: Next year alone, President Bush's budget calls for $206 million to go toward supporting those programs.
That money is going down the drain. Though supporters of abstinence-only education have long resisted any scientific study of the programs, information is beginning to trickle in. It's not pretty, and it shows that abstinence-only education is not stopping teens from doing, let's face it, what they were going to do anyway. A Minnesota study showed that while junior high students there were enrolled in abstinence-only education, their levels of sexual activity doubled. A recent Columbia University study showed that 88 percent of students who take virginity pledges will have premarital sex anyway, with no less risk of STDs, higher rates of oral and anal sex and far less chance of using contraception when they do have sex.
Small wonder that these programs are proving so ineffective: 80 percent of federally funded abstinence-only curricula "contain false, misleading or distorted information about reproductive health," according to a study conducted for Henry Waxman, a Democratic congressman from California. And small wonder that America's teenagers are consequently ill-informed about sex, believing that even unprotected oral sex is a safe alternative to sexual intercourse, as a University of California, San Francisco study released this month showed.
In Africa, and in the United States, what is becoming ever more apparent is that we cannot continue to wish away the problems that come with sex. We can't simply hope that teaching children not to have sex until they are married will prevent them from doing so. We need to start providing real solutions and real education so Bishop Kevin Dowling won't have to watch any more children die.
Alex Koppelman is a senior individualized major in the College from Baltimore and former editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine. Rock the Casbah appears on Thursdays.
