So we’ll have more pregnant teenagers, more ill-equppied child-mothers, more kids being poorly raised by resentful single parents whose own opportunities in life were cut short for lack of a pill or a condom. None of which leads to great health outcomes for either mother or child. Is it any wonder that the world’s wealthiest country trails the likes of Cypress, Morrocco and the Dominican Republic in health care?

If this depresses you, this gem from Paul Hipp might cheer you up.

Thanks to Txema and Kim Thomas.

Condoms lead to death, apparently. Since one in 10 adults in Dar is infected with HIV, you might think it more likely that unprotected sex leads to death. But perhaps to the Catholic fundamentalist who put up the posters, passing on a fatal virus is preferable to the sin of using contraception.

At the time, I wrote that “The Condoms = Death campaign … marks a shift in rhetoric from anti-abortion to anti-contraception among a small but vocal core of conservatives in the United States. Unless something is done about it very soon, that shift is going to be imposed on millions of women and men across the globe.”

It now looks like the first victims might be women on the home front. Under new regulations proposed by the US Department of Health and Human Services (pdf), many popular forms of hormonal and indeed mechanical contraception can be re-defined as abortion. And the legislation allows people who work in tax-funded clinics to refuse to provide those contraceptive services if it offends their delicate religious sensibilities. So much for separation of church and state.

Essentially, Conservative Christians, who’ve spent decades perfecting the use of the anti-abortion hot-button, are beginning to conflate contraception with abortion in much the same way as they’ve conflated prostitution with human trafficking. They don’t try to hide it: Human Life International, the Virginia-based Catholic organisation which is responsible for the Tanzanian posters, declares “We exist…to fight the evils of abortion, contraception, sex education and family breakdown”.

If this becomes entrenched in the States, it will certainly get exported around the globe. The AIDS funding legislation before Congress already prohibits the use of HIV prevention money to support contraception for infected women. We’re willing to give a pregnant women expensive antiretrovirals to prevent her passing HIV on to her infant, but we can’t give her cheap contraceptives if she’d rather avoid being pregnant in the first place.

It’s shocking and completely irrational. Though perhaps they’re just following the lead of the World Health Organisation. When I was last on a WHO contract the health plan wouldn’t pay for contraception, but it would pick up the tab for an abortion. Ho hum.

For more details on the US legislation, see Amie Newman and Cristina Page.

“The first year we had actually stayed – in 1998 – I had been extremely disconcerted to discover that everything of mine had been unpacked. Not only my clothes, but the entire contents of my distinctly ancient toilet bag with its range of unmentionables,” Cherie writes in her autobiography, serialised in The Times.

“This year I had been a little more circumspect, and had not packed my contraceptive equipment out of sheer embarrassment. As usual up there, it had been bitterly cold, and what with one thing and another . . .”

I’m not sure what to be more amused by. The idea that a 44 year-old married woman with three kids should be embarrassed about contraception, or the fact that the Blair’s apparently have more sex when there’s less heating.

Writing in the Guardian, Fran Abrams points out that the in-school clinic programme is spreading quietly across the UK. It’s not completely without detractors, but most parents recognise that the more information their kids can get about sex and drugs (and the rotten things they can do to you if you’re not sensible about them) the better. At least kids in southeast London don’t think they can prevent pregnancy with Mountain Dew.

Today, the US House of Representatives discusses a bill that will take US$ 50 billion out of taxpayers’ pockets and put it on the table for HIV treatment for people in poor countries. There’s some prevention in the new PEPFAR bill, too, though we’re still not allowed to use the money effectively to make life safer for people who inject drugs or sell sex. The new bill will increase the amount of money we can spend preventing HIV infected women passing the virus on to their infants (that cost US taxpayers US$ 195 million in 2007 alone). But not one cent will be available for services or advice that would prevent those women getting pregnant in the first place.

Why not? Apparently, because of aggressive lobbying on the part of an increasingly vocal anti-conctraception movement in Washington. The original draft bill reauthorising PEPFAR recognised that reproductive health services and HIV prevention should go hand in hand in countries where HIV is spread mostly in non-commercial sex between men and women (in other words in all of East and Southern Africa, and some of West Africa too). (see the draft text here). Then the Fundamentalists stuck their oar in. By the time the bill got through the House Foreign Affairs Committee, no PEPFAR money could be used to provide contraceptive advice or services for couples with HIV (though they may still get some condoms for disease prevention.

The hyper-conservative Family Research Council was one of the groups lobbying for the change, and FRC President Tony Perkins crowed about the victory in a press release:

“This bill is a marked improvement and is aimed at protecting life, not destroying it. …I especially applaud Rep. Chris Smith for his tireless work to ensure that PEPFAR does not create new family planning programs to fund international abortion groups.”

On their own website, FRC are even more explicit:

“Additionally the bill removes the “reproductive health” references that the Democratic majority was trying to insert.”

American Christians ranting about abortion is hardly stop-the-presses stuff. But there’s a not-so-subtle slide in the rhetoric these days: in the minds of the Hard Core, contraception is now equivalent to abortion. Pro-life is becoming anti-contraception, and no amount of common sense commentary seems to make any difference. If the good pastors of the United States wish to have no sex or large families, rah rah for them. But Congress should not allow them to impose their obsessions on the rest of the world. The current PEPFAR bill will do just that.

If you have any doubts about the move to smush contraception together with abortion into one big, evil, liberal, feminazi assault on what is Good and Right, take a minute and a half to look at this:

Having lived for years in countries where I could buy pills from street vendors at all hours of the day and night, I’ve got news for these girls: sadly, it’s not that easy to get laid.

People don’t have sex just because they can get the pill easily, any more than they start shooting up drugs just because they can get needles easily. (Britain’s pharmacies give millions of sterile syringes and needles to injectors every year, but that doesn’t make us all rush for a fix.) I suspect the biggest effect of making the pill more easily available will be to make both GPs and their clients less grumpy. My doctor doesn’t want to lecture me about exercise and blood pressure every six months any more than I want to make an appointment, take time off work, queue for 35 minutes and get lectured, just so that I can get my dose of progesterone. Pharmacists are probably rather better equipped than doctors to say: “Remember, love, you need to be using condoms as well as pills if you’re getting around a bit.” And they certainly have a greater incentive to say it, because it is their cash registers that will be ringing up the sales for both.