Congress Must Face Reality: Pass the PATHWAY Act

Washington, DC - April 2, 2007

“I just heard of effective use of condoms, but I never knew how to use them.” These are the words of Juliet Awour, a Kenyan woman featured in PAI’s new documentary, Abstaining from Reality: U.S. Restrictions on HIV Prevention. Neither Juliet nor her boyfriend knew how to use a condom, so he took it off during sex. As a result, Juliet became pregnant and contracted HIV the first time she had sex. Her story illuminates one of the gravest problems with a U.S. HIV prevention strategy that teaches abstinence-only: What do individuals know about HIV protection when they are no longer abstinent? In Juliet’s case, not enough. The Protection Against Transmission of HIV for Women and Youth (PATHWAY) Act (H.R. 1713), reintroduced last week by Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Congressman Chris Shays (R-CT), is a step towards helping individuals like Juliet get the life-saving information and supplies they need. Unless Congress acts now, there will be many more Juliets.

Juliet’s story is just one example of how a lack of education can do tremendous harm. Programs that fail to educate young people—many of whom are married—about every method that can help protect them from HIV infection, including abstinence and condom use, are nothing short of irresponsible. Promoting abstinence-only over more comprehensive education is clearly preferred by the Bush administration. However, it is not an effective prevention strategy for every person in every situation. Instead of empowering women and girls with the information to protect themselves, these inadequate policies and programs are placing many lives at risk.

The PATHWAY Act would make comprehensive prevention information more widely available by eliminating the requirement in PEPFAR that one-third of all prevention funding to go toward abstinence-until-marriage programs—a policy rooted in ideology rather than reality. A recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report agrees, “...congressional budget allocations have limited PEPFAR’s ability to tailor its activities to the local epidemic in each country and to harmonize with each country’s national plan.” U.S. prevention money would be better spent supporting comprehensive, evidence-based programs that reach more people and their evolving needs.

PAI strongly urges Congress to pass the PATHWAY Act. While we wait, more young women face insufficient knowledge about how to protect themselves from a fate all too similar to Juliet’s.

Population Action International (PAI) works to improve individual well-being and preserve global resources by mobilizing political and financial support for population, family planning and reproductive health policies and programs.