Religion and AIDS: Does Roman Catholic Teaching Kill?

In the Melbourne Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt challenges the conventional wisdom on AIDS prevention, suggesting that multiple sexual partners, not the lack of condoms, is the real problem in the spread of HIV/AIDS in the developing world.

An excerpt:

It is a fact that Pope John Paul II opposed condoms, telling African bishops again not long before his death that "fidelity within marriage and abstinence outside are the only sure ways to limit the further spread of AIDS infection".

So is this the advice that killed millions?

First, to believe that we must believe Africans are so obedient to the Pope that they won't wear a condom, but also so disobedient that they'll still have casual sex.

We’d also have to believe that more were killed by having unprotected sex outside marriage than were saved by doing as the Pope said and zipping up. We must further believe that most or very many Africans are Catholic, and are hit hardest by AIDS.

Naturally, the truth is the very opposite.

The countries with the worst HIV infection rates in the world turn out to be Swaziland and Botswana, where more than a third of adults have the virus -- but only 5 per cent are Catholic.

Botswana, incidentally, is pro-condoms, not that it seems to have helped much.

In contrast, Uganda, where half the people are Catholic, is the one African country that has slashed its rate of infection -- from a devastating 15 per cent of all adults to "just" 5 per cent. And, heavens, it worked this miracle by doing much as the Pope had preached.

Since 1986, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, backed by religious leaders, pushed his ABC program – telling people to Abstain until marriage, Be faithful to their partner, and, if all else fails, to wear a Condom.

This morals-heavy message was not welcomed by the usual condoms-please AIDS experts, many the kind of folk now heckling the dead Pope. Yet it worked so well that Dr Edward C. Green, a prominent AIDS adviser and medical anthropologist from Harvard's School of Public Health, was driven to write Rethinking AIDS Prevention, to warn us to learn this lesson.

"I said it in my 2003 book that the single most important behavioural change (in Uganda) was fidelity, and most of that is marital fidelity," Green has explained.

"The second change is the proportion of youth engaging in sex – that went down in a big way."

Fancy that. Christian morality makes you safer. How scary is that to a progressive? And in case you're wondering, Green says he's a "flaming liberal" who doesn't go to church or even vote Republican. He just follows the facts.

To make things worse, he adds: "Twenty years into the pandemic, there is no evidence that more condoms leads to less AIDS."

If they did Africa, which imports about 700 million condoms a year with the help of international agencies, would not today have 25 million people with AIDS.

Indeed, the University of California's Professor Norman Hearst, who has studied infection rates in condom-happy countries such as Kenya and Botswana, warns that pushing condoms and the safe-sex message so hard encourages people to be promiscuous, thinking they're protected.

They're not, of course. As Hearst says, condoms sometimes fail; so if you have enough sex with enough people enough times, you're flirting with danger.

The moral of the story? The Pope was largely right: saving sex for marriage is the best defence against AIDS. Save sex, not safe sex. We've seen it work, as other leading AIDS workers agree.

Last year, for instance, respected AIDS experts appealed in the British Medical Journal for more to be done to preach faithfulness instead of just condoms.

"It seems obvious but there would be no global AIDS pandemic were it not for multiple sexual partnerships," said the gurus, from groups such as the Global Fund for AIDS, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US Agency for International Development.

Emphases mine. Thanks to Ken’s comment at Kendall Harmon’s blog for the heads-up.

My question: does Bolt set up a straw man? Is the argument he’s answering really as simplistic as “Catholic teaching causes AIDS?” Is it really one of the biggest problems of the developing world that so many of its people are devout Catholics who want to behave and shun condoms, while misbehaving and fornicating constantly? Are those men really going to start using condoms because the church says so? Or is that even the charge?

So much debate over this and every other charged issue gets reduced to polemical soundbites instead of nuanced discussion. Maybe we can see some of the latter in this space...