Don’t hold U.S. AIDS relief program hostage to false abortion claims

AIDS was the rationale I moved to the West African nation of Ivory Coast in 1993 on the peak of its HIV epidemic. In my 35-year profession as a public well being physician and epidemiologist, I’ve witnessed a exceptional arc from a time when AIDS was a demise sentence to the current, when individuals dwelling with HIV can count on a standard life span, and the variety of new HIV infections and deaths in most African international locations has declined dramatically. This trajectory was made potential largely by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Aid, spearheaded by former President George W. Bush in 2003.

The toughest facet of my household’s six-year sojourn in Ivory Coast was witnessing the agonizing demise of sufferers and colleagues dying of AIDS. I recall all too nicely strolling the hallways of hospitals in Abidjan that have been lined with skeletal figures on stretchers, ready to die. But inside just a few years, PEPFAR reworked such tragic scenes replaying in lots of African international locations. Once we moved to Tanzania in 2005, AIDS was not a demise sentence because of the lifesaving HIV medicines offered by PEPFAR and different initiatives just like the World Fund.

Within the 20 years because it was launched, PEPFAR has saved 25 million lives that may in any other case have been misplaced to AIDS, and it has generated goodwill towards the U.S. around the globe. Till this yr, this system was reauthorized each 5 years whether or not Republicans or Democrats held a majority in Congress.

U.S. Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., and his colleagues are holding up reauthorization of PEPFAR due to allegations that this system’s funds could not directly help abortions. Smith was a longtime advocate of PEPFAR, and he has traveled via African international locations and met AIDS survivors who’re alive because of this system. But such encounters have been rapidly forgotten, and toeing the road of assume tanks just like the Heritage Basis took priority over the lives of AIDS survivors in different international locations.

The fees that PEPFAR {dollars} are supporting abortions in recipient international locations, as claimed in a Heritage Basis report, are utterly false. Organizations receiving PEPFAR funds are required to ensure that not one of the funds shall be used to advertise or present abortion providers. After I directed the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention’s PEPFAR work in Tanzania, we rigorously reviewed budgets and carried out website visits to make sure that all PEPFAR grant recipients adhered to those restrictions. My work on HIV/AIDS continues in my present job on the College of Washington, the place I oversee PEPFAR tasks in Mozambique and Zimbabwe; and we proceed to abide intently to the restrictions across the funding of abortion actions.

We have been lucky to be dwelling in Tanzania when President George W. Bush visited a number of PEPFAR websites there. The reception he obtained from throngs of individuals lining the roads and public areas the place he traveled was proof of the goodwill that PEPFAR engendered towards the U.S.

Whereas dwelling in Africa, we additionally noticed many growth tasks that have been funded by China, totally on the development of roads and buildings. However China doesn’t fund public well being packages on the scale that the U.S. does, and building tasks don’t save individuals’s lives. Thousands and thousands of individuals have survived AIDS because of U.S.-funded well being tasks.

Now will not be the time to hazard the exhausting work and goodwill fostered by hundreds of public well being staff and their counterparts in different international locations. Folks’s lives are at stake, and PEPFAR must be reauthorized and funded in its entirety and never picked aside on account of partisan political video games.