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Abstinence Works says New Study – Toronto AIDS Conference Silent

By Hilary White
 
TORONTO, August 15, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – While delegates at this week’s International AIDS Conference in Toronto are being told that the only hope for stopping the AIDS crisis in Africa is more condoms, the National Post reports that abstinence-only education works best to reduce sexual activity in teens and therefore the rate of sexually transmitted disease.
 
In addition, despite the theories of AIDS activists, the University of Pennsylvania study’s authors found that abstinence-only education also did not seem to affect the rates at which sexually active teenagers use condoms.
 
Speakers at the Toronto conference have emphasized prevention over hope for a cure. The disease has resisted efforts at creating a vaccine, say medical researchers, and a wait for a cure could be a long one. But the Conference’s emphasis on prevention has avoided the idea of teaching people not to engage in promiscuous sexual activity. To suggest that such activity spreads sexually transmitted diseases seems to be beyond the pale for most international AIDS activists who emphasize the use of condoms.
 
The Post says, however, that a study of 662 African-American Grade 6 and 7 children found those taught an abstinence-only approach were less likely to have had sexual intercourse by a 24 months' follow-up. The study compared these students with those who were taught the “safer sex” doctrine emphasizing condom use without mention of abstinence.
 
The study also refutes one of the treasured theories of AIDS opponents that while abstinence education may delay the “sexual debut” of children, it reduces their use of condoms, which, it is alleged, leaves them open to disease. This argument was reiterated this week at the Toronto Conference by William J. Clinton. The former US president, famously uninterested in sexual continence himself, told delegates that abstinence-only education endangers children.
 
That only condoms and medical research will halt the spread of the disease is axiomatic in the international AIDS establishment. In actual practice, however, abstinence education has thus far been the only program in Africa that has significantly reduced the rate of HIV/AIDS. In the decades of the AIDS fight, the rate of HIV transmission has increased dramatically as more and more condoms are distributed by the mostly UN funded organizations.
 
In the history of the AIDS epidemic, the one country that did emphasize abstinence reduced its AIDS infection rate from 30% of the population to 6% in a matter of a few years. In 2004, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni told the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok that the emphasis on condoms was killing uncountable millions of Africans by encouraging them to sexual promiscuity and a false sense of security.
 
Museveni said that to fight AIDS, societies must strive for “optimal relationships based on love and trust instead of institutionalized mistrust which is what the condom is all about.”
 
The Ugandan abstinence program, however, was largely dismantled by international AIDS organizations infuriated that their condoms-and-promiscuity approach had been so dramatically repudiated in practice.
 
In 2005, when the Ugandan program was under threat, US researcher, Joseph D’Agostino wrote that it is the promoters of condoms who are endangering lives. “The UN's approach has failed, and its own statistics show it,” D'Agostino wrote. “HIV rates keep rising, to over 30% in some countries.  Two decades of pornographic sex education and massive shipments of condoms have sent millions of young Africans to an early grave.”
 
Dr. Edward C. Green, PhD, an AIDS prevention worker and senior research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development said it was jealousy that killed the successful Ugandan program. Green said the Ugandan success, based as it was on sexual abstinence and marital fidelity, “directly challenges core values and attitudes enshrined by the Western sexual revolution.”
 
“How infuriating that an approach not funded by the big donors and scoffed at by foreign experts should prove to be the very thing that worked,” Green wrote.
 
Read National Post coverage:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=e02ea152-80e9-4e5e-beaa-e6...
 
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
International AIDS Conference Told by Leading AIDS Fighter Use Abstinence Not Condoms
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/jul/04071201.html
 
UN Anger Over Uganda's Successful Abstinence Program Fuelled by Loss of Funds Says Researcher
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/oct/05101404.html
 
Uganda AIDS Prevention Success Being Undermined by Infuriated UN Condom-Pushers
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/feb/05020408.html

 

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