Uganda Shows Contraceptives Not the Answer to HIV/AIDS

International   |   Dr. Brian Clowes   |   Oct 11, 2011   |   6:37PM   |   Washington, DC

The fatal danger of relentlessly pushing contraceptives on Uganda and other African countries was laid bare recently in an alarming new report showing that the most popular contraceptive in Eastern and Southern Africa may actually double the risk of contracting HIV. After experiencing success in combating HIV/AIDS in Uganda through an anti-contraception initiative, it’s not surprising to hear that contraceptives are part of, and not a solution to, the problem.

According to research published in The Lancet, women using the injectable birth control depot-medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) became infected with HIV at a rate of 6.61 per 100 persons, compared with 3.78 for those not using that method. When used by HIV-positive women, transmission of HIV to men occurred at a rate of 2.61 per 100 persons compared with 1.51 when the women had used no contraception.

The study involved 3,800 couples in Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Uganda.

Uganda made news in the fight against AIDS over the past decade because President Yoweri Museveni successfully attacked his country’s high HIV/AIDS rate through a program of systematic behavior modification. President Museveni said in 2004 that, “AIDS is mainly a moral, social and economic problem,” and that the best way to fight it is with, “relationships based on love and trust, instead of institutionalized mistrust, which is what the condom is all about.”

The President’s program is called ABC: “Abstain before marriage, Be faithful after, and use Condoms only when absolutely necessary.” The key to the program has always been the strong discouragement of condom use for more than 95 percent of the public, because the Ugandan government is well aware of their high failure rate.

When the ABC program was instituted in 1992, the adult HIV/AIDS infection rate was an astounding 30 percent in the capital of Kampala and other large urban areas, and the national life expectancy for the entire country was a dismal 44 years. As the ABC program took hold, the adult HIV/AIDS infection rate dropped 80 percent in just ten years, to six percent in 2002, and the life expectancy has jumped by eight years.

However, at the beginning of the new millennium, several influences began to cripple the ABC program. Foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) began to aggressively undermine the program simply because they could not allow it to succeed.  In fact, the program has actually been too successful for the population controllers’ liking, and represents a real threat to their dogma of “Condoms first, condoms last, condoms always.”

Martin Sempa, the “brains” behind the Ugandan success story, is familiar with the thinking of the population controllers. After speaking at a 2006 Toronto AIDS conference, Sempa said that they suffer from a “pathology” of hatred for abstinence and motherhood.

What Sempa called “abstinophobia – fear of sexual abstinence and fidelity as a way of fighting HIV AIDS – and “matriphobia”–” irrational and paranoid fear of programs that promote marriage and motherhood – are “the last gasp of life for a sexual revolution that has gone stale in the West, and which is using the AIDS crisis as a means of keeping itself going.”

However, one must ask why the population controllers are still so motivated to attack African abstinence and African motherhood when the continent is already so sparsely populated. These well-funded NGOs sincerely believe that Africans must shed their “outmoded” and “backwards” cultural norms and join the “developed” world in its unfettered pursuit of unlimited sex and material wealth. Nowhere is this more evident than in Uganda, where a proven way of saving lives is being discarded in favor of ideological enslavement to the condom. The corrupting money from the West is now flooding Uganda — about $1 billion over the past decade.

The result of this “contraceptive imperialism” is as predictable as it is dismal. The Ugandans are becoming desensitized to sex and are beginning to regard their traditional customs as outmoded — which, of course, is precisely the idea.

Uganda has boundless possibilities for pro-life activism. The people naturally love life, the leadership of the nation is almost uniformly pro-life and the bishops and priests are fearless. The population control cartel, however, has shown its sordid talent at corrupting even the most life-loving countries.

The population controllers have demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that they do not care if the HIV/AIDS rate is reduced in Uganda; they only care that their worldview is imposed on the people, and if the result is the deaths of hundreds of thousands, so be it. Their activities have already directly caused the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Ugandans. Not only are they pushing contraceptives that actually promote the HIV epidemic, they are committing human rights abuses on a huge scale with virtual impunity, and are ignoring the laws of this sovereign nation.

LifeNews.com Note:  Brian Clowes is Director of Research and Training for Human Life International. He has travelled to over 50 nations worldwide, has written extensively in various media, and has written ten books, including the recently released Pro-Life Pastoral Handbook. With affiliates and associates in over 100 nations worldwide, HLI is the world’s largest international pro-life organization.