The New Springtime Is Here

In the back halls of organizations like Planned Parenthood in the USA and the FPA here in New Zealand, they will be wondering what’s going on in 2008. First, a court in New Zealand says that abortion is not being practiced according to the spirit or letter of the law. Next, just across the ditch in Australia, up to 250,000 Catholics from all over the world are gathered to show the world just what the next generation is going to look like and what they might be thinking. In the case of the latter event, it gets worse because the world actually seems to be listening and watching with a degree of admiration. Scary stuff if your beliefs rest entirely on “freedom of choice” and the “right to choose”.

But what will really be worrying the ideologues of the sexual revolution is a small public health piece that has emerged in the prestigious scientific journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the May 9 issue of the journal Science.

10 prominent public health experts make a set of comments regarding policies and endeavours surrounding preventing the spread of AIDS. Simply put, the authors have broken their conclusions down into two points: what appears most effective and what does not. The conclusions are interesting: condom use, HIV testing, vaccines and microbicides and treatment of infections other AIDS are considered to have weak effectiveness. In a remarkable feat of mental gymnastics, the authors acknowledge straight away that abstinence “completely prevents sexual transmission, and young people should be encouraged to delay sexual debut” but then go on to say that “most HIV infections occur among people in their 20s or older, when most are sexually active and, thus, abstinence is unlikely to have a major epidemiological impact’. To paraphrase GK Chesterton, this is like saying “My parents forever; drunk or sober”.

However, sanity prevails on the “what works” side of things. Interestingly, there are only two things which seem to stop AIDS in its tracks in Africa: male circumcision and the reduction of multiple sexual partners. Hardly rocket science and funnily enough, aspects of a Judeo-Christian heritage which has been discarded over the last 200 years by the West. As evidence of the effectiveness of reducing multiple sexual partners, the authors quote the Ugandan experience amoung others. What they don’t acknowledge is the fact that the Ugandan experience also relied heavily on abstinence. 

So, the sexually free ethics of this age seem to be experiencing some road bumps. When public health specialists with no favour for the Catholic Church conclude:

Currently, the largest donor investments are being made in interventions for which evidence of large-scale impact is increasingly weak, whereas much lower priority is given to interventions for which the evidence of potential impact is greatest (see figure, page 749). About 1% of total requested funding is for MC, and probably only a fraction of “community mobilization and mass media” and “workplace” efforts would be focused on reducing multiple and concurrent sexual partnerships. This balance needs to be reassessed.

and when 250,000 young (and some not so young), devout, excited and dedicated Catholics watch the Pope step off a boat in Circular key, give him a rock star welcome and worse, listen to him preach and AGREE with it….

You know the spring tides are returning.