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Cambodia's fight against AIDS set back by Bush administration action
SIEM REAP, Cambodia--In this country, Asia's hardest hit by AIDS, the disease enjoys overwhelming superiority in its war against the indigenous forces of life. In the 1970s the Khmer Rouge all but eradicated the educated, including doctors, and Cambodian M.D.s today make only about $30 (U.S.) per month. Fortunately, there are equalizers--mercenaries of mercy such as the U.N. Population Fund, which the Bush administration last week sadly refused to fund.
With clinics here, at Phnom Penh, and elsewhere in this country of almost 12 million, the UNFPA is one reason Cambodia, despite its high HIV infection rate, is an AIDS success story. Educational and condom-distribution programs targeted at prostitutes and other high-risk groups cut the AIDS rate from 3.3 percent of the population in 1998 to 2.6 percent in 2002, says the World Health Organization. The plague here no longer rages. Tens of thousands of Cambodians who otherwise would be rotting on their death beds are healthy and contributing to the ongoing resurrection of their country from a communist boneyard; untold children have avoided orphanhood.
The UNFPA, unlike, say, America's Planned Parenthood, is not an abortion provider in euphemistic masquerade. The agency--staffed in Cambodia mostly by gentle, hard-working, idealistic native people--cannot give even indirect abortion referrals. UNFPA programs such as the Reproductive Health Initiative for Youth in Asia (RHIYA) are by any intelligent understanding "pro-life." RHIYA workers counsel pregnant women on nutrition and other aspects of prenatal care. Also, the program gives abstinence more than a lick and a promise by, for example, encouraging young people to delay sexual activity and involving Buddhist monks in reinforcing a message of sexual purity. But it recognizes the gaps in "moral armament." Almost half of new HIV cases are married women absolutely faithful to their husbands. It's Hubby who strays, often with devastating results. Condom provision in this context can hardly be called licentious.
President Bush based his decision to withhold $34 million from UNFPA (a bit over 10 percent of its budget) on the agency's supposed acquiescence to China's coercive family-planning regime: Beijing often has leaned on Chinese women, with a tyranny's heavy weight, to undergo abortions or surgical sterilization. However, UNFPA says that in the 32 Chinese counties where it's operated since 1998, its programs have helped cut female sterilization by 16 percent--surely joyful tidings from Rome to the studios of the 700 Club--and boosted contraceptive use by 90 percent. The fewer unwanted pregnancies, the fewer forced abortions. The administration's defunding can, not preposterously, be read as an attempt to placate misinformed Christian conservatives, an important part of the Bush base.
A depressing factoid: The Khmer Rouge ran destruction's sword so deep into Cambodian society, which still suffers some 10,000 AIDS deaths per year, that there exists today no modern Cambodian dictionary. Conversely, the United States is the world's communications center. Its president could and should be explaining reality to his constituents, not pandering to their fatal prejudices.
