Posted by Todd Zywicki:
Pope Benedict on Condoms and AIDS:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_15-2009_03_21.shtml#1237588827
I read [1]this editorial in the Washington Post yesterday and it
seemed to me that the editors must've been making a straw man out of
Pope Benedict's position on condom use and AIDs:
THE LATE New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said,
"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts."
This holds true even for the pope.
While on a flight to Cameroon on Tuesday to begin a weeklong
journey through Africa, Pope Benedict XVI said, "You can't resolve
[the AIDS epidemic] with the distribution of condoms. On the
contrary, it increases the problem." In a perfect world, people
would abstain from having sex until they were married or would be
monogamous in committed relationships. But the world isn't perfect
-- and neither is Pope Benedict's pronouncement on the
effectiveness of condoms in the battle against HIV/AIDS. The
evidence says so.
Are condoms foolproof protection against infection by HIV, which
causes AIDS? No. Sometimes they break, and sometimes people put
them on incorrectly. Still, doctors on the front lines of the fight
against the AIDS epidemic established long ago that the use of
condoms greatly diminishes the transmission of HIV, the cause of a
disease that has no cure. That the pope chose to question the value
of condoms in fighting the nearly 28-year-old scourge while heading
to the continent whose people are most affected by it is troubling.
According to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS,
sub-Saharan Africa is the epidemic's center, with 67 percent of the
world's 32.9 million people with HIV and with 75 percent of all
AIDS deaths. Heterosexual intercourse is the "driving force" of the
epidemic.
Now the peculiarity in this editorial is that the Post insists that
"the evidence" says that Pope Benedict is wrong. Yet the Post cites no
evidence to support its position. Instead, it offers a hypothesis and
implies that common sense says it must be right--but that's not
evidence. Obviously it is true that if you have sex, using condoms
will reduce the transmission of AIDS.
But is seems obvious that was not the Pope's point. Obviously what he
had in mind is that the promotion of condom use leads to an increase
in sex and that the increase in sex leads to an increase in AIDS
infection. The question is an empirical one.
And, in fact, I see from [2]Mirror of Justice that is exactly what the
Pope had in mind. I haven't done an exhaustive empirical investigation
as to the accuracy of the findings reported there or whether they are
generalizable. But although the Wa Po insists that there is evidence,
it doesn't actually provides any evidence for its argument or against
Benedict's claim that urging condom use will lead to an increase in
sex. Instead it seems like the Post simply misunderstood Benedict's
argument and instead attributed an utterly illogical and senseless
position to him, implying that his position is something stupid like
using a condom while having sex does not reduce the transmission of
AIDS. If the Post was not treating the Pope's position as a straw man
argument it seems like it would have done well to actually provide
some evidence that would disprove the Pope's actual claim.
References
1.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031803136.html
2.
http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2009/03/condom-use-and-aids.html
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