The New York Times - Friday, December 20, 2002

Asia is expected to be the site of the next AIDS explosion. Yet at a United Nations population conference in Bangkok this week the American delegation tried to block an endorsement of condom use to prevent AIDS. It's not often that a vote is taken at a U.N. meeting, where consensus is usually the goal. But this time participants voted -- and the other nations united in striking down the American position.

By now, embarrassing behavior by the Bush administration at international meetings on women, health and the environment has become almost routine. The consequences, however, go beyond resentment and ridicule. Mr. Bush has concluded that family planning and sex education abroad -- including AIDS education -- can be sacrificed to please the far right without angering Americans who want to keep abortion legal here. Assistant Secretary of State Gene Dewey said in Bangkok that the U.S. "supports the sanctity of life from conception to natural death," a statement, we suspect, the administration would not dare make with the cameras rolling at home.

Washington tried to strike from the conference's document endorsements of "reproductive health service" and "reproductive rights" because these can include abortion and abortion counseling in nations where the procedure is legal. The United States also objected to promoting condom use among adolescents to prevent AIDS, on the theory that it encourages underage sex. Abstinence is the goal, says the administration. But there is plenty of evidence that teaching abstinence doesn't work -- and the alternative for young women in Asia is not only pregnancy but, increasingly, AIDS.

Teenage girls get AIDS largely because they are pressured into sex by older men. To deny them access to condoms and counseling about how to negotiate safe sex is a deadly strategy. Whatever the Bush administration believes about when life begins, it should not advocate measures that increase the possibility it will end in early adulthood.

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