Jodi Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity, criticized the Bush administration’s handling of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a lecture Tuesday in ICC 102.
Jacobson said that heavy religious influence from evangelical Christians has led to a moralistic rather than a public health focus on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
She criticized the Bush administration’s insistence on abstinence education and the declining availability of birth control.
Currently, a minimum of one-third of HIV/AIDS prevention funding from the United States goes to abstinence-only programs, and that is “the floor, not the ceiling” for the funding, Jacobson said. She added that the budget numbers do not add up because the largest percentage of funding does not go toward solving the greatest cause of infection.
“On the floor of the Senate, you would hear people talking about gay men getting what they deserved and they felt people should just avoid sex and have it only in marriage and if they didn’t then the consequences were their problem,” she said.
Jacobson described current programs as “very targeted” with a “narrow sense” of the problem. The epidemic has become a generalized issue, she said, but condom distribution programs remain focused on high risk groups, including people in the commercial sex industry. The programs have used a “rescue and rehabilitation” method of HIV/AIDS prevention, Jacobson said, but it has not been effective.
“We’re not talking about people who wake up one day and say, `Wouldn’t commercial sex work be fun?’ They are driven to it by necessity,” she said. “The rescue and rehabilitation method takes them out [of the commercial sex industry] and assumes they won’t go back.”
People acting out of faith to promote their religious are not the answer to the epidemic, Jacobson said.
“Faith alone won’t solve these problems,” Jacobson said, adding that many faith-based groups have taken a public health approach.
“People have sex. It is a fundamental and biological human reality, and we do nothing by denying it,” she continued. “The Bush administration talks a big game about funding. I want to say, `show me the money’ but I also want to say `show me the process’ because the money alone won’t do anything.”
The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief called for $15 billion in funding over the next five years for prevention, treatment and care of HIV/AIDS victims.
With the theme of Wednesday’s annual HIV Day being women and girls, Jacobson discussed the high risk women face of becoming infected. Biologically, women are more susceptible to contracting the infection, and in many countries they are economically disadvantaged and do not have the social standing to demand safe sex, she said.
More than 50 percent of those infected with HIV are women, Jacobson said. She also noted that there are approximately 40 million people infected world-wide with five million new infections every year and three million deaths each year.
Jacobson encouraged students to educate themselves on the HIV/AIDS issue to make themselves “more legitimate proponents” of their cause through “evidence-based advocacy.”
She also asked students to mobilize people in different communities and urged for a rapid-response movement against abstinence-only programs.
The event was sponsored by the AIDS Coalition and H*yas for Choice.