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Condoms cause death:  an unconscientious objection

July 21st, 2008     by Catherine Hayday     Comments

This is a poster put up in Dar Es Salaam by the Roman Catholic organization Human Life International, who “exist… to fight the evils of abortion, contraception, sex education and family breakdown”.

From Elizabeth Pisani’s site:

“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, 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.”

Tags: body politics

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