Condoms A Women's Rights Issue In AIDS Fight

by Marwaan Macan-Markar

(IPS) BANGKOK -- Chompoo Yokhee and Simon Onaba represent two extreme poles of a debate that is coursing through the deliberations of the 15th International AIDS Conference. The deliberations are on whether condoms are good for a woman's health.

For Chompoo, a 30-year-old Thai mother of two girls, a condom could have ensured a healthy life. Nine years ago she was infected with HIV after having sex without a condom with her husband.

"It is very important for husbands to use condoms," Chompoo said in an interview. "I had no voice to tell him to use a condom. He asked me why I wanted to use a condom, whether I did not trust him."

And during the conference, being held from July 11 to 16 at a sprawling convention centre north of Bangkok, she will be joining other Thai women in a space set aside for non- governmental organizations -- the Global Village -- to challenge those who doubt her message: that condoms save women's lives.

Onaba of Uganda, however, has come to the Bangkok meeting to make a different case.

It is not condom use that is the answer to save youth from HIV, but abstinence, he argued passionately during a debate on Monday that touched on the U.S. government's policy towards sexuality -- with a stress on abstinence, being faithful and condom use only for risky sexual behaviour, better known as the "ABC" policy.

"The A and B of ABC is a guarantee that takes you off the risk of getting AIDS," said Onaba, an abstinence social marketing specialist at the Makerere Community Church in Kampala.

"It is possible for young people to say no to sex, to feel empowered," said the young Onaba, who confessed during the debate that he had gone from being sexually active to abstaining from such pleasure after being awakened to its merits while he was a university student.

But if the discussions here are any indicator, then Onaba's voice -- calling for youth to abstain from sex till marriage -- is a lonely one against a chorus that is venting its rage against the administration of President George W. Bush for advancing the ABC policy as the answer to contain the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

For Washington's critics, the ABC policy amounts to a death sentence for women, given that it takes away the only protection they have available from being infected by the killer disease during sex.

"The ABC policy is devastating to the health of women," Steven Sinding, director-general of the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation, told IPS.

"If a woman is subjected to an unwanted sexual advance, at least if she can insist on a condom it will help save her from an infection," he added.

UN officials are as incensed. The ABC approach offers no option for girls coerced into sex, said Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), during a panel discussion on sexual health policies that are best for young girls and women.

"Faithfulness is no protection either," she added. "There is a need to rethink the ABC approach."

But on Sunday, a senior U.S. government official at the conference, one of a small delegation at the meeting which has attracted over 15,000 participants from some 160 countries, defended Washington's position.

The U.S. government is not against condom use, said Randall Tobias, U.S. global AIDS coordinator, at a press conference. "We will make condoms available to individuals who indulge in high- risk behavior."

The push for greater condom use to prevent girls and women from succumbing to HIV comes in the wake of a report released on the eve of the international conference that has highlighted the pace at which AIDS is acquiring an increasingly female face as it enters its third decade.

According to that report by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), nearly 50 percent of the estimated 38 million people who are victims of the pandemic are women.

"Women are more physically susceptible to HIV infection than men. Male-to-female transmission during sex is about twice as likely to occur as female to male ones," states UNAIDS.

What is more, the UNAIDS findings have exposed other myths held in high regard by conservatives. "Marriage and long-term monogamous relationships do not protect women from HIV," the UN agency adds.

That has been the case in Cambodia, Thailand and in Sub- Saharan Africa, given that men have continued to have sex not only with their wives, but with girlfriends and sex workers.

Such a stress on women at this year's IAC is a welcome change from the past, says Alice Welbourn, chair of trustees of the International Community of Women with HIV/AIDS.

"This is the first time in 20 years of the pandemic that there are a number of sessions where women's issues are being taken seriously," Welbourn told IPS.

Women have been desperately trying to get issues that concerned them taken up at the biennial IACs, she added. "But over the years, slowly, there has been a recognition of the issues linking women with HIV."

"There has to be a global involvement of positive people, particularly women and girls in our case, in all of the decision-making processes that affect our lives," she said. "Because we are the ones who have lived with this reality and we are the ones who have overcome the enormity of the discovery of our diagnosis and we must be out there to do something about it so that other people don't go through what we have gone through."