Liberal academic Edward Green: the Pope is right about Aids and condom

According to Harvard professor Edward Green, Benedict XVI tells the truth about fighting the plague of the millennium in Africa: fidelity and abstinence promotion are better weapons than preservatives.

During his latest visit to Africa pope Benedict XVI told the journalists: “Condom distribution is not the solution to Aids, on the contrary they worsen it”. An editorial comment of The Lancet retorted that the Pope's comment was “outrageous and wildly inaccurate”. Based on your experience about the issue, is the Pope right or wrong?

http://www.tempi.it/007320-liberal-academic-edward-green-pope-right-about-aids-and-condom?page=0

Bleak stories behind failed condom campaigns

Chinwuba Iyizoba
Before blanketing the continent with condoms to stop AIDS, why don't you live in rural Africa for a while?

Sub-Saharan Africa has two-thirds of the world’s HIV/AIDS cases. So you would think that Western journalists and politicians might condescend to ask us what we think about how to fight AIDS. But they haven’t. A pity, because they would have found that many of us support Pope Benedict XVI’s scepticism about the effectiveness of distributing condoms.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/bleak_stories_behind_failed_condom_campaigns/

African AIDS: the facts that demolish the myths

Michael Cook

The mystery of why AIDS has been so devastating in Africa has been solved. And it’s not lack of condoms.

Benedict XVI’s recent comment on the African AIDS crisis -- "the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem" – provoked an international sensation all out of proportion to its half-sentence length.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/african_aids_the_facts_that_demolish_the_myths/?view

The Pope was right about AIDS in Africa

Who’s the real expert?
Jokin de Irala

Did any journalists ask an epidemiologist whether the Pope might be right about the ineffectiveness of condoms in fighting the African AIDS epidemic? We did.

Pope Benedict XVI ignited a firestorm of controversy earlier this week. On a flight to Cameroon where he later greeted rapturous crowds, he held a press conference. A French journalist asked him about the African AIDS epidemic. What he said was only half a sentence, but the repercussions in the Western media were explosive: “the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem.”

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/whos_the_expert/

Maternal Mortality: Death by Childbirth

Third world mothers face health risks that have been eliminated from the industrialized world. Mercator Net interviews Dr. Robert Walley, the founder and executive director of MaterCare International and an emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.

Dr. Walley: Mothers in the developing world are experiencing unimaginable suffering due to a scandalous lack of effective care during pregnancy and childbirth, with the consequence that many thousands are dying. The World Health Organisation estimates that there are over 500,000 maternal deaths annually, of which 99 per cent occur in developing countries. There is no accurate data to substantiate these numbers, the reason being that most developing countries do not report information on births, deaths, the sex of dead people or the cause of death. However, figures from my own experience at a mission hospital in Nigeria, where the in-hospital maternal mortality ratio was 1,700 per 100,000 live births, illustrates the enormity of the situation.

Some 200 million women are pregnant, world-wide, each year. Most mothers deliver in villages without access to safe, clean facilities and without a trained person to assist them. Most maternal deaths occur during the last trimester and in the first week following delivery. Practising in Canada prior to going to Nigeria in 1981 and since then, I have never had a mother die under my care from a direct obstetrical cause, or been present at such a death. Maternal deaths in Canada are at the level of what is called irreducible minimums, 1/100,000 live births. However, at the mission hospital maternal deaths were almost a daily event. I recall one weekend during which there were four deaths of mothers who had arrived at the hospital, two in extremis from haemorrhage, one in agony from obstructed labour, and another with a ruptured uterus after days in labour because she was young and consequently her pelvis was too small. Others would arrive unconscious due to pregnancy-induced hypertension, or suffering from malaria or severe anaemia resulting from malnutrition. Most mothers die in Africa alone and in terror in villages, as they have no way of getting to the hospital. These deaths of mothers and babies are the greatest tragedies of our times especially since they are readily preventable and treatable.

The disparity in maternal mortality and morbidity rates, between developed and developing countries, is greater than any other commonly used measure of health status. Pregnancy related deaths are one of the major causes of death and disability occurring among women in the reproductive age group. This loss is twice that of any other diseases including AIDS, malaria, TB or sexually transmitted diseases. There is no single cause for male mortality in this age group that comes close to the magnitude of maternal mortality and morbidity. The tragedy is that the solutions to this suffering have been known for decades and cost very little. ...

MercatorNet: It is 21 years since the Safe Motherhood Initiative was launched in Nairobi to address this problem, and 8 years since it was made one the UN's Millennium goals, and yet the director general of the WHO said recently that "the world failed to make a dent" in it. What is your analysis of this failure?

Dr Walley: A report in the British Medical Journal in July 2007 said that at the present rate of progress the 5th Millennium Development Goal will not be met for 275 years -- in 2282, not in 2015 as intended. The reasons are poverty, lack of compassion, lack of political and professional wills, a conspiracy of silence, and a lack of imagination. That any woman should die giving birth in the 21st century is an international disgrace.

The responsibility in my view lies partly with national governments but also very much with Western governments, the UN and other international agencies e.g. those of the European Union, DFID (UK), CIDA (Canada) and USAID and, of course, the radical feminist movement, which cares little for motherhood. These are compromised by their desire to control populations in developing countries. While billions of dollars have been and are being spent on reproductive health programmes (a euphemism for birth control) only a small fraction is focused on providing emergency obstetric services that ensures that women survive their pregnancies -- services which are freely available to all mothers in rich countries.

We have known the causes of maternal deaths for over 100 years -- haemorrhage, infection, hypertension, obstructed labour, septic abortion -- and we eliminated them in the our rich world by providing essential obstetrical care to mothers one at a time. The former Director General of WHO, Dr. Halfdan Mahler, commented in Nairobi in 1987, “We know enough to act now, it could be done; it ought to be done; and in the name of social justice and human solidarity, it must be done.” It hasn’t been.

MercatorNet: What we do hear a lot about is "unsafe (illegal) abortion", along with some alarming statistics. Is this a major cause of maternal deaths and ill health? What's the real answer to this problem?

Dr Walley: Abortion unfortunately has been around forever. In our times it has been promoted as choice, as a right; we are all familiar with the arguments which has brought us to the devastating numbers found in developed countries. Septic abortion is said to account for 8 per cent of maternal deaths in developing countries but, again, nobody knows as statistics are not kept. Nevertheless, abortion is a sad fact of life resulting from poverty, lack of education, coercion and a lack of alternative help. In panic the woman goes to the open door of the abortionist who may be a traditional birth attendant in the village, but is frequently is a health provider who has limited skills and equipment, who procures the abortion for money. However, the numbers are exaggerated to promote an agenda which is to have abortion legalized as a human right.

Read the whole interview here.

The Papacy Stands for Freedom?

Usually, the Papacy is a symbol of unfettered authoritarianism. But in the topsy turvey world of the conflict within the worldwide Anglican Communion, things have taken an interesting political turn.

A leading conservative cleric has launched a devastating attack on the Archbishop of Canterbury, accusing him of “betrayal” and calling his office a “remnant of imperial colonialism”.
Writing in The Times, the Most Rev Henry Orombi, Archbishop of Uganda, says Rowan Williams has betrayed churches that remain true to the Bible by inviting colleagues who consecrated the openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire to the Lambeth Conference. ...
The Archbishop of Uganda stands by the biblical texts that rule against homosexuality but says that he and his peers do not want to cause schism by leaving the Anglican Communion.

So far, this is a pretty typical statement of the conflict between the conservative African south and the liberal European North. But here is the statement that got my attention:

He writes: “Even the Pope is elected by his peers. But what Anglicans have is a man appointed by a secular government. Over the past five years, we have come to see this as a remnant of British colonialism, and it is not serving us well.

“The spiritual leadership of a global communion of independent and autonomous provinces should not be reduced to one man appointed by a secular government.”

Wholesale conversions to Catholicism, as a protest against remnants of colonialism? Stranger things have happened.

More on AIDS in Africa

This article in Zenit interviews Matthew Hanley, long-time technical expert on AIDS/HIV for the Catholic Relief Service. He is also author of a new book on AIDS in Africa, Avoiding Risk, Affirming Life: Science, Love, and AIDS. His conclusions have significant overlap with those of Helen Epstein, whose book I reviewed earlier. She argued that a reduction in the number of sexual partners, not an increase in the use of condoms, accounts for the most significant drops in new HIV infection rates. According to Matthew Hanley:

Actual changes in patterns of sexual behavior have led to the most significant reductions in HIV prevalence. Take the well-known case of Uganda, where the prevalence rate dropped from 15% in 1991 to a little over 5% in 2001. Behavior change was so thorough in Uganda that by the mid-1990s, 95% of adults in that country said they had only one partner or none at all. But it is not only Uganda.

The most important factor in recent HIV declines observed in several other countries, such as Kenya, Zimbabwe and Haiti has been an increase in fidelity or "partner reduction." This should not be altogether surprising, considering that in a large swath of southern Africa, where over half of new infections globally come from, the AIDS epidemic is being driven by the dynamics of multiple and often concurrent sexual partnerships.

In other words, changing behavior is more important than reducing the risk associated with a given set of behavior.
Hanley also talks about the uniquely Catholic aspects to his work. Not only is the Church trying to prevent disease, she is also trying to promote a healthy way of life, that integrates love and sexual activity within the context of married life.

We try to articulate what the Church actually proposes, abstinence and fidelity, in a positive manner. I have found in my trips to Africa that there is a real thirst for something different, something hopeful. We all know that people yearn for more than the satisfaction of their appetites. In other words, they yearn for love, for respect and for meaning in life. In his first encyclical, "Deus Caritas Est," Benedict XVI reminded us of long-standing Christian tradition, namely that human beings are a "union of body and soul," that love is characterized by exclusivity, or fidelity, and that love contains a quality of permanence over time.

When we conducted training recently with five dioceses in Ethiopia, one of the participants, a wife and a mother, spoke for the group by saying how much she appreciated the emphasis on fidelity and related human values such as respect and communication. She was puzzled as to why such basic themes are not more routinely promoted in the context of HIV prevention, adding: "Why hasn't anyone explained it like this before?"

So we try to address the whole human person, their deeper aspirations, and in proposing love, affirm basic Christian sexual ethics. It is on this level that the Church then encounters the wider culture, which as Pope John Paul II suggested in "Familiaris Consortio," often holds "fundamentally irreconcilable views of the human person and of human sexuality," leading many to aggressively reject these first principles.

Money quote from Matthew Hanley:

Perhaps one of the most helpful means that I have seen of expressing the moral significance of the issues involved comes from the Kenyan bishops. In their pastoral letter on AIDS, they hit upon the crux of the matter: The Church proposes the same sexual morality even "when and where AIDS poses no danger." The central issue with respect to the Church's consistent teaching on sexual matters is thus not the risk of HIV, but the lack of chastity, and "this is not easy for 'the world' to grasp.

What a concept.
I look forward to seeing his book.