Sex, Lies and Abstinence

Last December, at the London offices of the sexual and reproductive rights organization International Family Health, employees found a festive musical email in their inboxes. Entitled "The 12 STDs of Christmas," the four-part harmony sing-along began: "On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me/a bug that made it hard to pee." Stick figures danced at the bottom of the screen, displaying symptoms of each sexually transmitted infection. By the sixth day of Christmas, true love had brought with it "pubic lice, gonorrhea (five golden rings!), genital herpes, syphilis, chlamydia, and the possibility of HIV." Suffice it to say, the state of affairs had not improved by day 12.

"Don't play the sex lottery. Use a condom," was the message following the song, "Worried you've picked up something? Visit www.playingsafely.co.uk."

Who had cooked up this comic little e-card? None other than the UK's National Health Service. Well done, thought activists of their own government.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the US government's strategy for disease prevention was hardly in tune with the philosophy that has taken root around the world -- and so masterfully expressed by the Brits: Give people accurate, comprehensive information and services, and they are more likely to stay healthy. Instead of finding similarly clever ways to disseminate such information to the American public, the Bush administration was actively trying to censor it.

The most blatant attack was the severe gutting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) fact sheet on condoms, which had been disappeared from the website in July 2001 and replaced, with significant battle scars, in December 2002. Pre-Bush, the fact sheet had encouraged consistent condom use, advice supported by vast bodies of scientific research that show condoms to be 98-100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. "The primary reason that condoms sometimes fail," read the original fact sheet, "is incorrect or inconsistent use, not failure of the condoms itself." Following that statement was user-friendly guidance on proper use.

Now, according to the once nonpartisan CDC, abstinence is the "surest way to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases." Along with the condom "how to," the CDC removed the "Programs that Work" section, which summarized several large studies of teenagers that found no increase or hastening of sexual activity among those who were taught about condoms.

Revising the CDC website is just one of the many ways the Bush administration has sought to distort and suppress scientific inquiry, not to mention sound public health policy, that contradicts its so-called family values.

"We've been monitoring a deeply unsettling trend where public health science is being supplanted by politics and ideology," says James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a proponent of comprehensive sexuality education. The Bush administration has stacked scientific advisory panels with ideologues who have scant credentials and conflicts of interest; flooded schools with medically inaccurate "abstinence-only" programs; punished HIV/AIDS prevention groups with audits; and gagged overseas healthcare workers who receive US funds, repeatedly exemplifying its willingness to let ideology trump the very pillars of democracy it claims to be defending.

This agenda is so ruthless that members of several domestic sexual and reproductive rights and health organizations speak of a pervasive "climate of fear" created by the Bush administration; a climate in which entities on various levels, from non-governmental HIV/AIDS prevention groups to high schools and even epidemiologists at the CDC, are being pressured to toe the party line.