Lifting The AIDS Death Sentence
The Vatican indicates it may Lift Ban on Condom Use in AIDS Regions
The woman was dignified, reserved, accepting – the only response to her death sentence a dimming in the light behind her brown eyes. Finally she spoke and the translator interpreted for us: ‘‘I have four children, the baby is six months old and the eldest is four,’’ she said. She had just heard she was HIV positive and realisation was dawning that they would grow up as Aids orphans. I’ve never been able to forget that diagnosis in a doctor’s clinic in The Gambia, or the stoicism in the woman’s face. Or that her first impulse was anxiety for her children’s future, not to ask what were her chances. I guess she knew she was doomed – she had witnessed enough deaths from this relentless wasting disease already. She was in her mid-twenties and wearing vibrantly-coloured batik clothing, her best going-to-hospital dress and a matching turban. Already the clothes hung loosely.
I was an observer at a clinic operated by the British Medical Research Council and afterwards the doctor told me something of the patient’s history. Her husband had been diagnosed HIV positive earlier and had subsequently infected his wife, a common story. ‘‘How long does she have left?’’ I put the question the woman did not ask. He studied her blood test results on his desk. ‘’Her immune system is extremely compromised – a year at the outside,’’ he said. ‘What will happen to her children?’’ I continued. ‘‘Usually the grandparents raise them.’’ He paused before using an arresting description I was hearing for the first time, although it is now commonplace in the context. ‘‘A whole generation is being wiped out.’’
If the news had been announced then, six years ago, that the Vatican was preparing a paper on condom use for Aids sufferers I’d have felt encouraged. Today my emotion is closer to anger; it’s been such a long time coming.
That mother-of-four I encountered briefly is dead now, her husband too, their children orphaned in common with so many others. There are15 million Aids orphans worldwide, 12 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa. And I can’t help wondering how many more people like that courageous woman in her orange and blue native dress will die, leaving orphans, while Vatican theologians sharpen their quills and scrutinise the niceties of their subject. Or how many people died last year, and the year before that, while the Papacy continued to insist on its unforgiving code. So inexorable is the death tally, it has precipitated calls for reform within the hierarchy – most recently from Milan’s retired Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who urged a relaxation of the anti-condom diktat on the ‘‘lesser evil’’ principle. And he’s apparently taking a liberal stance! Who needs any justification other than that condoms will save lives? The wholesale loss of life is what’s evil here, the orphans stranded in its wake, not any measures that might alleviate the pandemic.
The Catholic Church moves slowly, however, changing only under intense pressure. But change does happen and there’s one in the wind right now. It’s just a matter of the Vatican finding a way to climb down without admitting it was wrong. So wrong that 5.8 million people worldwide had to be infected with Aids or HIV – the World Health Organisation’s figures – before it contemplated action. The current debate within the Vatican saddens me, even if seems clear Pope Benedict has already decided to reverse his predecessor’s fatally flawed policy. The need for Vatican mandarins to tease out, in their document, something so glaring obvious reminds me of how misaligned the Catholic Church can be. Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, whose department is drawing up the paper, spoke of it as warranting ‘‘prudence’’. No, not prudence – speed, I would have thought.
Such pronouncements remind me of that sense of regret I feel for Catholics of genuine faith who placed their trust in their Church, even when they didn’t understand – and were distressed by – some of its arcane rules. Directives set in stone one day and suddenly overturned. But the pain they had caused before that happened … People who were told their stillborn babies were in an invented place called limbo and could never go to heaven; couples in what used to be called mixed marriages denied such celebratory trappings as music at their wedding, instead made to feel it was an ignominious affair. And then one day the Catholic Church decommissioned limbo, stopped insisting it was a sin to miss mass on Sundays, no longer obliged women to cover their hair entering a church or to be churched – decontaminated – after childbirth.
There were – still are – so many rules and regulations about how to conduct your life, all of them invented by men and imposed on the faithful. Decrees about condom use are simply one more example. The difference is that people pay scant attention to the contraception ban nowadays in the western world (Italy, home to the Holy Father, has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe). But in Africa, Asia, South America, they continue to listen and obey these rigid old men who govern them. And some of them die from it.
Over the past 20 years, the Aids legacy has been a generation of children without parents. By 2010 there will be 18 million such orphans, the Aids charity Avert predicts. These orphans are being generated so fast and furious that family structures can no longer cope and the children themselves often find themselves thrust into the parental role. An additional burden is the economic impact on a region because HIV deepens poverty due to loss of labour.
Of course the spread of Aids is not just down to the Catholic Church’s veto on condoms. HIV drugs need to be cheaper and made more widely available. Macho attitudes in relation to condom use in some cultures must be tackled, and continuing education and outreach programmes are crucial. Cultures change as slowly as the Catholic Church.
But even the Vatican seems on the brink of accepting that its traditional mantra of sexual abstinence is untenable, defective and downright impractical. In time, I expect its approval for condom use will be broadened to take into account the population explosion worldwide. In the meantime the Catholic Church continues to hold a number of dogmatic views and to inflict them on its members. We laughed uproariously at the Scientologists’ nonsense about silent births, in the case of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but was the long-standing code about not eating meat on Friday any less absurd?
A more pressing problem, when it finally becomes apparent to even the most doctrinaire ostrich in Rome that reform can be denied no longer, is the lack of urgency within the decision-making process.
You and I might imagine that so many deaths, so many orphans, deserve a bit of fast-tracking policy. Yet the Papacy seems to reserve the fast-track process for rushing through yet another batch of saints – prioritising the dead above the living. Who need condoms a lot more than they need saints.
