House Faces Close Votes on Abstinence and Contraceptives
Contact: David Bryden, 202-789-0432, Ext. 211, or 202-549-3664 mobile
Washington, DC, June 20, 2007—Tomorrow the full House is expected to vote on the FY2008 Foreign Aid bill, and close votes are expected on several amendments directly relevant to HIV/AIDS.
Health advocates are in high gear to defend two key provisions. The bill currently contains language that would require the Administration, for 2008, to employ evidence-based approaches to HIV prevention. It would give it the option of waiving the requirement that at least one-third of HIV prevention funding go towards abstinence-until-marriage and fidelity programs.
Secondly, a provision of the bill would allow family planning organizations to receive donations of contraceptives and condoms from USAID. The provision would not allow programs to receive direct US financial support for the purchase of these products.
The White House has issued a statement critical of these provisions, and both will be challenged by amendments, brought by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), respectively.
"We strongly back both of these provisions related to HIV prevention and access to contraceptives, and we urge the House to reject the Pitts and Smith amendments," said Dr. Paul Zeitz, Executive Director of the Global AIDS Alliance. "There are about 13,000 new HIV infections each day, and so we must make sure the prevention strategies we are using are effective. In addition, family planning programs must have the products they need."
"The provision making the approach to prevention more flexible would not, on its own, solve the problem with US policy in this area," said Zeitz. "We need a permanent fix to ensure that programming is indeed comprehensive in nature, and that's why the PATHWAY Act is so important. However, this provision would be a significant step in the right direction."
Twenty-one organizations, including the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Global Action for Children, signed an appeal to the House of Representatives to approve the bill with these provisions and to reject the Pitts and Smith amendments.
The United Methodist Church also released a statement in support of the provision making the approach to HIV prevention more flexible. Linda Bales, of the General Board of Church & Society of The United Methodist Church,
said: "This provision will allow US-funded programs to better respond to the differing features of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in each country.... Abstinence needs to be a critical component of sex education, but not the only component. The United Methodist Church opposes any amendment which would remove the provision, approved by the Appropriations Committee, which makes the abstinence requirement more flexible."
A letter from five Representatives to their fellow House members stated: "The Pitts amendment would do away with this practical, common-sense, one-year fix and instead force the Administration to continue programming prevention funds according to a convoluted mathematical formula as an end in and of itself, rather than as a means to preventing 7 million new infections." The letter was signed by Representatives Lee, Lantos, Payne, Waxman, and Slaughter.
According to two congressionally mandated reviews from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM), as well as countless experts in the field, the abstinence restriction is detrimental to the overall AIDS effort.
The so-called Mexico City policy restricting access to contraceptives is also detrimental to women's health. Under this policy, shipments of contraceptives from the US government have been stopped to 20 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Providing modern contraceptives to the 200 million women in the developing world who desire, but lack access to, this health care intervention would avert 52 million unwanted pregnancies annually, and prevent approximately 29 million abortions, 142,000 pregnancy-related deaths, and 505,000 children from losing their mothers.
The FY2008 Foreign Aid bill also includes an increase in overall funding for AIDS programs, necessary because the epidemic is expanding rapidly and the US has committed to helping the world achieve universal access to all AIDS-related services by 2010. However, Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) will offer an amendment to reduce funding for the Global HIV/AIDS Initiative by $1.2 billion.
The cut proposed by Rep. Hensarling would also severely impact global control of tuberculosis and malaria, because it would reduce the US contribution to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. The White House today expressed concern about the level of funding for the Global Fund included in the bill, even though President Bush backed a large expansion in grantmaking by the Fund at the recent summit of G8 leaders.