Hijacking AIDS Relief

CHARLES COLSON

There is an old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It is a message members of Congress ought to pay heed to when it comes to the spread of AIDS in Africa.

One of the Bush administration’s most successful programs is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — PEPFAR for short. It is the biggest health initiative ever undertaken by any country to fight a single disease.

When the president announced his five-year, $15 billion plan in 2003, only 50,000 people were receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. As Bishop Harry Jackson noted at Townhall.com, “The results [of this initiative] have been phenomenal. . . . The [AIDS] program helped provide antiretroviral treatment for over 1.4 million men, women, and children . . . Over 86,000 children, age 14 and under, are receiving this life-saving treatment.”

Key to PEPFAR is prevention programs that rely on the “ABC” approach: Abstinence, “Be Faithful,” and condoms if necessary. Jackson notes that this approach has been hugely successful, proven so in Uganda, in reducing risky behaviors. The ABC programs have reached more than 40 million people, including nearly 11 million children. They have “helped create a healthy change in personal behavior and social/sexual norms among young people,” Jackson writes.

Clearly, PEPFAR has shown itself to be a spectacular success — so naturally, liberal policy makers decided they needed to fix it.

Worst of all, the proposed changes would undermine the ABC approach in favor of simply using condoms.

Next week, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is expected to mark up a renewal bill called “The U.S. Global HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008.” That is a mouthful. But pro-abortion groups have gotten their hooks into the bill, and if they have their way, the AIDS initiative will bear little resemblance to the programs that have proven so successful.

For example, these policy makers want to get rid of a pledge in which recipients of PEPFAR funds will not support the legalization of prostitution or sex-trafficking. But as Representative Chris Smith (R-N.J.) says, the pledge is intended to “ensure that pimps and brothel owners do not become U.S. government partners.”

The revised bill also undoes rules that prevent money from funding abortions. So out of the 50 billion dollar pot for HIV/AIDS relief, much of it could be diverted from faith-based groups to abortion providers. Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.) puts it bluntly: The proposed changes would “transform the program into a mega-funding pool for organizations with an abortion promotion agenda.” The pro-abortion interests apparently have the elitist idea that the way to solve AIDS in Africa is have fewer Africans.

Worst of all, the proposed changes would undermine the ABC approach in favor of simply using condoms. This, despite the fact that several countries that have abandoned the ABC approach in favor of condom-only have seen their HIV-infection rates go up.

I hope you will contact your congressman and ask that PEPFAR be renewed exactly the way it was originally written. The plan is not broken. If liberal policymakers are allowed to “fix” it, millions of Africans will pay the price, and your tax dollars will be funding Planned Parenthood’s abortion agenda.

For Further Reading and Information

Harry R. Jackson, Jr., “Let’s Keep Our Eye on the Ball,” Townhall.com, 11 February 2008.

Jennifer Marshall, Daniel Moloney, Ph.D., and Brett D. Schaefer, “Keeping PEPFAR International AIDS Relief on Target,” The Heritage Foundation, 13 February 2008.

Michele Keleman, “Bush Plans Africa Trip to Tout HIV/AIDS Programs,” NPR online, 15 February 2008.

Rukmini Callimachi, "US aid to Africa buoys Bush image there," Miami Herald, 15 February 2008.

Charles Colson with Anne Morse, “Beyond Condoms,” Christianity Today, June 2003.

Mark Stricherz, “ABC vs. HIV,” Christianity Today, April 2003.

BreakPoint Commentary No. 031027, “Blinded By Ideology: Abortion Trumps Health Care.”

BreakPoint Commentary No. 030317, “The African AIDS Crisis: Fighting a Modern-Day Plague.”

Catherina Hurlburt, “The Moral of the Story: AIDS and True Mercy,” BreakPoint WorldView, September 2005.

Catherina Hurlburt, “World AIDS Day,” The Point, 1 December 2006.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Charles Colson. "Hijacking AIDS Relief." BreakPoint Commentary February 20, 2008.

From BreakPoint ® (02/20/2007), Copyright 2000, Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with the permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries, P.O. Box 17500, Washington, D.C. 20041-0500. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or distributed without the express written permission of Prison Fellowship Ministries. "BreakPoint ®" and "Prison Fellowship Ministries ®" are registered trademarks of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

THE AUTHOR

Charles Colson launched Prison Fellowship in 1976, following a seven-month prison sentence for Watergate-related crimes. Since then, Prison Fellowship has flourished into a U.S. ministry of 50,000 volunteers and has spread to more then 50 countries. Beyond his prison ministry, Colson is a Christian author, speaker, and commentator, who regularly confronts contemporary values from a biblically informed perspective. His "BreakPoint" radio commentaries now air daily across the U.S. and he has written 14 books, including God & Government, Loving God, Answers to Your Kids' Questions, The Line Between Right & Wrong: Developing a Personal Code of Ethics, Against the Night: Living in the New Dark Ages, and How Now Shall We Live: A Study Guide.

Copyright © 2008 Breakpoint

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