Bush giveth and Bush taketh away

The one program that I had thought George W. Bush deserved some praise for -- his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa -- now appears to have been a case of giving with one hand and taking away with another. The program put billions of dollars into treatment for AIDS patients but prohibited the use of any of the money for family planning.

Thus, on a continent where less than one in five married women use birth control, there has been an explosion of births -- and of course many of the babies are born HIV positive, thus undermining the very program to combat AIDS.

According to McClatchy news service:

Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.

Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.

The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.

However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa's epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world's poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility. . . .

Several decades ago, "the population explosion" was considered a time bomb. Then, important international programs to promote family planning in poor countries made significant strides in actually reducing birth rates -- until this was again reversed by conservative control of our government, whose anti-abortion fervor extended even to opposition to condoms -- aided and abetted by the Pope, who preached to the Ugandans that condoms actually increase the spread of AIDS.

So, in the interest of preventing abortions, no family planning = no condoms, which would have prevented much spread of HIV in addition to pregnancies.

Once again, the world can go to hell because of ignorance and prejudice. It is very sad and an abominable shame that the lives saved by AIDS drugs are off set by the increased number of babies born HIV positive because of the hand that took away what the other hand gave.

There seems no end to the harm that George W. Bush & Co. did to the world -- and all the result of a one-vote margin in the U. S. Supreme Court. For shame !!! Everlasting shame !!!!

Ralph