PEPFAR deserves renewal
Washington Examiner
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Few acts of American intervention have saved as many lives with as little cost as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR. Since George W. Bush signed the program into law in 2003, PEPFAR has saved an estimated 25 million lives, reduced new HIV infections by 42% from their peak, and ensured that more than 5 million babies have been born HIV-free through the program’s dissemination of drugs and counseling to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS across Africa.
PEPFAR has managed to do all of this at the cost of just $6 billion per year, or $100 billion over the course of the past 20 years. For reference, we have spent more than $113 billion on Ukraine in just the past two years. We spent more than $2 trillion on Afghanistan in 20 years, only to have the country fall to the Taliban in a fortnight.
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And yet PEPFAR, whose annual outlays comprise less than 0.1% of the federal government’s total spending, is on the cusp of being killed by the very Republican Party that created the program in the first place. Why? Because some claim that a program that saves more than a million lives a year is insufficiently pro-life.
Specifically, PEPFAR has been accused of promoting abortions and pushing a radical gender ideology. There’s just one problem: PEPFAR and its partners do not do any of these things, much less with taxpayer money.
Although Biden rescinded the Mexico City policy, the Helms and Siljander amendments still forbid PEPFAR from funding or even advocating abortions. PEPFAR contracts also contain conscience clauses, allowing Catholic contractors to withhold services such as condom distribution and even discriminate against potential patients on the basis of their sexual orientation. PEPFAR is also legally required to spend at least half of its prevention funds on promoting abstinence and faithfulness in countries with a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. For at least a decade, PEPFAR was the single largest funder of abstinence programming in sub-Saharan Africa.
There’s a reason why the program, championed at its inception by evangelist Franklin Graham, is currently being defended by Rick Santorum. The prominent social conservative took to Newsmax to defend PEPFAR and call for the program’s reauthorization, explaining that without a clean reauthorization, there will be no authorization.
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“No funds can be or ever have been used to pay for abortion on demand,” the former Pennsylvania senator writes. “The Hyde amendment is in effect, and has been, since PEPFAR began. We understand why anti-abortion organizations, Post-Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, would like to see the Mexico City policy put on PEPFAR, but with Democrats controlling the Senate and the Biden administration the pen, it won’t happen during this Congress.”
PEPFAR has already saved millions of lives and will save millions more without funding a single abortion. It deserves to be renewed.