I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. But when President Bush announced today that he is asking Congress to invest $30 billion in his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) plan over the first five years after he leaves office, I was surprised at the timing – why now?

According to The Washington Post:

"Bush's announcement comes in a week when he is highlighting his administration's commitment to international development and human rights protections — both of which will be major items for discussion next week when he joins other world leaders at a Group of Eight summit meeting in Germany."

And while President Bush deserves praise for his call for this additional money to fight HIV/AIDS, the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) has a bigger picture in mind. They have called on Congress to remove "onerous restrictions" on prevention funding under the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) that are "grossly undermining efforts to stem the spread of HIV."

Approximately 33% of funds designated for prevention efforts through PEPFAR are earmarked for abstinence-until-marriage programs that are not only ineffective but ultimately dangerous – putting women and girls in harm's way by promoting ideologically-based policies:

"Increased funding for global AIDS is a necessary but far from sufficient response to the global AIDS epidemic," said Jodi Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity. "…Today, unprotected sex is the single greatest factor in the spread of HIV worldwide, and is responsible for 80 percent of new infections in sub-Saharan Africa, but the Bush Administration insists on funding abstinence-only programs that have now been discredited by the Institute of Medicine, the Government Accountability Office, and numerous independent research studies…"

CHANGE sees a web of factors that keep women and girls extremely vulnerable and is desperately trying to get the world's governments to see them too. CHANGE, a member of the Women Won't Wait campaign, is calling on the members of the G8 and our own Congress to look at a whole host of issues that keep women and girls extremely vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. The Women Won't Wait campaign has a powerful and logical call-to-action that they are pushing the members of the G8 to consider. It includes examining the fact that "women and girls are at a heightened risk of HIV infection as a result of their economic, social, political, and sexual subordination, and also because of high rates of violence and sexual assault perpetrated against them."

In those contexts, committing millions of dollars to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs as a prevention method seems like the Nancy Reagan call to "Just Say No" (and we all know how well that turned out). According to CHANGE, eighty-percent of women worldwide who are living with HIV contracted the virus from their husband or primary partner. Abstinence-only-until-marriage as a prevention strategy has absolutely no relevance to the lives of women vulnerable to HIV/AIDS around the world.

As Jodi Jacobsen says, "This is not a prevention strategy, it is an exercise in unreality."

You can tell President Bush to cut the abstinence-only-until-marriage earmark from PEPFAR ("Ignorance Will Not Protect Us").

For more in-depth coverage of this issue, please read Susana Fried's post on the fantastic report she co-authored.