peripheries

Lies, more lies and Pro-life Missionaries

July 16th, 2008 | by roger |

Elizabeth at The Wisdom of Whores brought my attention to the website of Human Life International whose mission is “to promote and defend the sanctity of life and family around the world according to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church through prayer, service and education.”

HLI boast the results of its impressive detective work in Tanzania that “resulted in the destruction of over 10 million condoms.” HLI is clearly against the promotion or use of condom for the prevention of HIV infection and has a 12 points “facts sheet” about condoms.

Being a scientist I decided to assess how successful HLI was in fulfilling its “education mission”, and found the pro-life educational apostolic organisation verging and even falling into the pitfall of disinformation as well as censuring information favourable to comdoms.

The main issue with HLI so-called facts is that they immediately come up as being taken out of context, snippets of information that may well come from the sources cited but meaningless without context. In many cases it was difficult of even impossible to track back the source, many of them being outdated. But it was possible in a few cases

Fact 2 - “Spillage from condoms occurs as much as 65% to 75% of the time.” Bjorklund and Gordon. Univ of Manitoba. Nov. 1990”

This publication can not be tracked in the database because it was only an abstract presented at a conference in Switzerland in Montreux in 1990. A PDF files is available on Dr Gordon website though there was no such statistic in this particular work of Dr Gordon.

Conversely in an article entitled Could condoms stop the AIDS epidemic? published in the Journal of Theoretical Medicine 5(3-4), 171-181 in 2004, the same Dr Richard Gordon concluded that “In other words, for populations with reasonable average numbers of HIV-infected partners, given the will and effort, it is within our means to halt this epidemic using condoms.”

Fact 9 - In one test, 33% of latex condoms leaked HIV sized particles. Sexually Transmitted Disease Vol.19. 1992. The abstract for this article is available in the PubMed database and what HLI does not quote is the conclusion of this research article:

“Thus proper use of latex condoms would result in exposure reduction from HIV of at least 4 orders of magnitude. These findings demonstrated that use of latex condoms can significantly reduce the risk of HIV transmission, but it does not eliminate that risk.”

The last statement has never been challenged, even by those who promote condoms as it is known and understood that condom’s success rate is not 100%. The 33% leaking rate observed in this paper included 25% of condoms leaking at the rate of 1 nanoliter per second. This is a very low rate that gives little indication of how much viral particles this nanoliter may contains (that would depend on the viral load of the potentially HIV-infected user) or of the risk of these particles to be in a number large enough to be infectious. Beside it is a figure rather hard to fathom without being put into context, i.e, considering that the average volume of an ejaculate is 3 millilitres, it would take 833 hours or nearly 35 days for the whole ejaculate to leak out. The figure speaks volume and for itself.

Fact 11 (Elizabeth’s favourite) - IPPF indicates that the risk of contracting AIDS during so-called “protected sex” approaches 100 percent as the number of episodes of sexual intercourse increases. Cates Medical Bulletin, IPPF 1997.

I could not track back this issue of the Medical bulletin online, but I was able to track back a scientific publication by William Cates Jr in 1997 related to condoms and from where this piece of information may have been taken from. And again, HLI omits to mention what W. Cates wrote in this review of various means of preventing primary HIV infection:

“Encouraging “environmentally protective” behaviors in these settings [brothel] can reduce the population-level prevalence of all STDs, including HIV infection. The 100% condom policy of Thailand-a national policy requiring clients of sex workers to use condoms during all sexual acts-is one example of a successful environmental intervention.”

Having commented on W. Cates’s work but let put this in other word: The risk of having a car accident while driving with a seat belt approaches 100 percent as the number of kilometres travelled increases (seat belts kill, that was an argument of the anti-seat belt lobby!).

This little research done (I could not easily track the other references) there was not much incentive for looking further into the validity, relevance or significance of the Human Life International Condom Facts Sheet.

One could hardly accuses the missionaries behind HLI to be liars; how could so well-intentioned and fervent God-praising people so obviously flaunt God’s eighth commandment?

Is laziness more appropriate? Or intellectual fallacy? Short sighted reasoning? Lack thereof?

“In many countries, HLI is the pro-life movement. Were it not for HLI, whole continents, like Africa, would be left virtually defenseless against the culture of death.”

Obviously whole continents won’t be better educated with HLI and the culture of death may well grow from the ignorance enforced by these missionaries.

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Note added: The title was edited to reflect with more accuracy the group of the people involved. Fact 11 was clarified.

Related Posts:
¤Of Condom and Women in Malaysia

¤HIV: Thailand versus The Philippines

¤Clash of the Titans: Abstinence vs Condoms

¤If the Church supported condoms…

¤Sex, HIV and Condom use amongst Gay Men in the UK