So instead, I’ll have a rant about something that is somehow still shocking to me: the lengths to which loopy anti-abortion groups in the United States will go to deprive women of safe contraception and sexual health care. The target, once again, is Planned Parenthood. Over a one-week period last month, men went in to the sexual health service providers clinics in 11 cities, claiming to be sex traffickers seeking services, including abortions, for the underage girls they’ve enslaved. That would be a really dumb strategy for a real sex trafficker — in the US, even more than in Britain, the authorities are under pressure to find the army of enslaved girls that the abolitionists conjure up at every turn. It’s a well-hidden army; though a massive UK crackdown led to over 500 arrests related to selling sex a while back, it didn’t yield a single trafficker. Not that that has stopped the abolitionists’ conjuring. Shame on The Guardian for not referring back to its own excellent investigative work in this area.

Planned Parenthood immediately suspected that no trafficker would be that dumb. Certainly not 11 traffickers in different cities in a week, when such a thing had never happened before. Though it smelled like a hoax, they dutifully reported the alleged trafficking to the FBI and asked for an investigation. Now Loopy anti-abortionist group Live Action has admitted, with some pride, to their juvenile prank. They’ve released two of their “undercover” videos, to which they’ve they added juvenile-prank-style title screens.

My personal favourite: “Planned Parenthood Gets the Pimp Discount for His Underage Sex Slaves”. I will say that the clinic manager in New Jersey sails pretty close to the wind. But then which of us who has tried to provide services for people in need who have nowhere else to go does not bend the rules? As Planned Parenthood says: “Falsely claiming sex trafficking to health professionals to advance a political agenda is an astoundingly cynical form of political activity.”

Compared to this, the standard operating procedures in the AIDS world — using Global Fund money to buy 4x4s for officials — seem somewhat tame.

Update: (or rather backdate). Steve sent me this interesting reminder of an earlier assault on Planned Parenthood. Sigh.

Unsustainable? Well, there’s latex to dispose of, or worse still, population growth. But on the upside sex warms you up without needing to burn fossil fuels. It’s a renewable resource. And if it’s on offer for free this week in Copenhagen, it might just provide the positive energy to break some of the log-jams in the negotiations.

I’ve followed the build-up to the conference (beautifully dissected by Sam Kinght, writing in Prospect), with some amusement. Way back when I was writing The Wisdom of Whores, a friend from the World Bank was rolling his eyes at every UN agency’s willingness to hook itself to the HIV wagon. I quoted him thus:

““The UN institutions are professional beggars, and beggars go where the money is,” he said. “So you get “culture and AIDS”, “kids and AIDS”, “fish and AIDS”. I’m just waiting for “climate change and AIDS”.”

It wasn’t until months later that I saw the first headlines linking HIV to climate change. Just recently, there’s been a UNFPA report about it, which means it’s now official. As Rasna Warahp pointed out in Kenya’s The Nation, the real link between HIV and global warming will probably be that as more funding goes to the latter less will go to the former.

An aside, since I’m mentioning both development fashion and the World Bank: I am reliably informed that that venerable institution last week headed off a bid to have every loan reviewed for the effect that it has on trafficking of persons (which in the current climate is more or less equated with trafficking of women into the sex indutry). Just sometimes, common sense does prevail.

Thanks to Ron of greencollar for sharing the determination of the Danish with me.

I believe we can come pretty close to wiping out trafficking into prostitution, sexual slavery and torture, and we can do it in part by raising the cost of slavery as Kristof suggests. But we can only do that if we make a clear distinction between sexual slavery and prostitution. Kristof acknowledges that there’s a spectrum, but every fibre of his prose yearns to make it a continuum: however much autonomy you now have, you started selling sex because you were physically, mentally or financially enslaved. The hunger to sympathise with the girls who really have been enslaved — and let’s be clear that slavery does exist in the sex trade — clouds his thinking.

“Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade,” says Kristof, suggesting motorcycle theft as a respectable alternative. But the examples he gives in his column raise the costs not just of trafficking, but of prostitution across the board. That’s like cracking down on slavery in the American south by taking measures against all farming, regardless of who’s working the fields and how much they get paid: it turns the outcome on its head. The cost of running an establishment which provides decent health and safety standards for sex workers increases disproportionately, leaving the field to the more abusive businesses. What we need is to manipulate incentives in the other direction — to support regulation of businesses that allow women to sell sex when they want to, to clients they are willing to serve, at a price they’re willing to work for, and in conditons that protect their health and their safety. That makes it much easier to crack down on businesses that don’t meet these standards.

Kristof urges the Obama administration to crack down on slavery, and I support that. But in these troubled economic times, I don’t think anyone thinks that the new president should crack down on employment.

Thanks to Kim Lee for prodding me on this issue.