Over 60% of all people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa

Ilana Mercer:

That Sub-Saharan Africa “is home to more than 60 percent of all people living with HIV” is by and large the Catholic Church’s fault, as Lerner sees it. No matter that an enormous AIDS-education effort has been underway for some time in these regions. Or that there isn’t a village that has not been missionized by AIDS educators. It is the church’s opposition to providing “birth control information to the poor of the world,” that has ensured “AIDS would spread and kill millions in Africa,” or so Lerner alleges. According to his logic, Church doctrine is killing Africans, for whom salvation will come when the Church joins Planned Parenthood’s African chapters in hanging condoms on every baobab.

Presumably Lerner knows that the main source of HIV transmission in Africa is rampant, promiscuous, heterosexual sex. One doesn’t have to be a South-African AIDS counselor, as I once was, to know that much. What moves people to fornicate into the afterlife? The inability to refuse sex, for one. Sexual violence is endemic in Africa, and I don’t mean campus “date rape.” In South Africa, for example, a woman—toddlers and babies included—is raped every few minutes. Cultural factors also determine infection rates.

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