PREVENTING AFRICANS IS A TIMELESS VOCATION

Safe no more (Shelley Page, Ottawa Citizen, October 24th, 2004)

Consider this: Ten billion condoms were required this year in the developing world -- but only 2.5 billion were available. And in sub-Saharan Africa, a man had access to only three. Other contraceptives are also as rare as gold. In Kenya, not even a drop of the preferred birth control, Depo Provera, is available.

Rural women walk for many hours to distant clinics and dispensaries, only to be turned away because the facilities don't have Norplant or birth control pills.

Countries such as Kenya, struggling to slow their birth rate and stop the spread of HIV, have been devastated by a global contraceptive shortage caused by circumstances, some of them beyond their control: United States policies that promote abstinence over contraception, the indifference of developed nations, corruption and inefficiencies within their own country, and the rise of HIV/AIDS.

Last month, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) predicted the acute shortage of family planning counselling and contraceptives in developing countries will cause a population explosion.

Already, there are more young people on the planet than any time in history. The latest figures show that half of the world's 6.4 billion people are under 25, while 20 per cent are aged 10 to 19.

"We are facing a disaster," says David Adriance, a Nairobi-based health care worker with EngenderHealth, a U.S.-based organization that provides reproductive health care services for the world's poorest women. "We have the largest cohort of young people that the world has ever known. These kids are hitting reproductive age and we have nothing in place for them. No sex education. No contraception. Few services."

There is something for everybody in this rambling, incoherent piece. It is definitely a challenge to figure out exactly what the population control industry is trying to say these days. It seems Africa is so poor it can’t make or buy condoms, so it needs billions of them donated from the West, but Africans don’t like to use them much, so it needs the pill and Norplant, which don’t prevent AIDS, which is spreading fast because of the lack of the condoms Africans won’t use, so the continent is being ravaged by death, but there this terrifying new population explosion....

Oh, heck, there are too many Africans and it’s Bush’s fault.