Barbara Lee Responds to Report on President’s Global AIDS Plan Cites Call for Elimination of Abstinence-Until-Marriage Earmark
(Washington, DC) – Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) responded to the release today of the Institute of Medicine’s report on the implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Lee was a coauthor of the bipartisan legislation that established PEPFAR, which designated $15 billion for the prevention, care, and treatment of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.
“The Institute of Medicine’s report represents an authoritative evaluation of this critical tool in our fight against the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, and it offers us very useful insights into what is working and where we can make improvements,” said Lee. “We should be encouraged by the progress being made in addressing mother to mother-to-child transmission and the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator’s commitment ‘to learning by doing and contributing to the evidence base for how to combat global HIV/AIDS most effectively.’”
One area cited by the report for improvement, however, is removing the requirement that 33 percent of all prevention funds be earmarked for abstinence-until-marriage programs. According to the report, the abstinence-until-marriage funding requirement “has greatly limited the ability of the Country Teams to develop and implement comprehensive prevention programs that are well integrated with each other and with counseling and testing, care and treatment programs and that target those populations at greatest risk.”
Lee, whose recently reintroduced PATHWAY Act includes a provision to eliminate the abstinence-until-marriage earmark, emphasized the importance of making sure that prevention programs are rooted in science and are achieving results.
“Our HIV prevention policies should be based in science, not ideology. We need a comprehensive and balanced prevention approach that achieves results, and this report shows that the insistence on abstinence funding is disrupting the development of country specific prevention plans and keeping us from achieving the results we are looking for,” said Lee.
The report also echoed language in the PATHWAY Act urging that a greater emphasis be placed on the needs of women and girls in order to create a sustainable long term response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Specifically, the IOM called on PEPFAR to “increase its focus on the factors that put women at greater risk of HIV/AIDS and to support improvements in the legal, economic, educational, and social status of women and girls.” Lee’s bill, H.R. 1713, would require the president to develop a comprehensive plan to address twelve key issues that contribute to gender disparities in the rate of HIV infection.
In addition to co-authoring the legislation that created PEPFAR, Lee also co-authored the Global AIDS and Tuberculosis Relief Act of 2000, which established the framework for the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. To date, the Global Fund has committed $4.4 billion in 128 countries to support aggressive interventions against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. In 2005, she successfully passed and the president signed in to law legislation to focus U.S. foreign assistance on the impact of AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children in developing countries.
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