Free The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World by Michelle Goldberg Page A

“I was so young, and every year I’d get pregnant, because I didn’t know any better—I didn’t know about family planning,” she said. The man had a safe, and Annet knew he kept his money there. What she didn’t know is that that’s also where he kept his antiretroviral drugs. He never thought to tell her that he was HIV-positive.
    A widowed friend of hers who had moved to Kampala from Uganda’s remote northwest urged Annet to accompany her to get tested, but Annet was too scared to ever pick up the results. Then her friend passed away, and with nowhere else to go, her three kids went to live with Annet. When Annet’s sister died, her two children joined the household as well.
    She finally found out she had HIV after giving birth to a baby who tested positive. Three months later her husband died. Four of her five children turned out to be infected. Now she’s trying to keep ten children healthy and fed, but the only income she has comes from the Mamas Club.
    Her story sounds extreme in its desolation, but many of the women had similar ones. Some were pulled out of school when money ran tight and were forced into early marriages with men who beat them when asked to use condoms. Some, after being tested, were chased away from home by the men who had infected them. Their bodies were taxed by frequent childbirth, which wasn’t always voluntary. “The men continue saying that you must have children,” said Mungherera. “I have a number of mothers who say the men say they must have more and more and more until their eggs are finished.”
     
     
    A nd yet, even as the AIDS crisis is fueled by the lack of women’s rights, some in Africa blame female promiscuity for the pandemic. One sign of this was the spread of virginity-promotion programs directed solely at girls. In 2001, the king of Swaziland decreed a five-year ban on sex for young women, which included a prohibition on women wearing pants, a garment said to incite men to rape. Virginity testing became a kind of craze in several countries hard hit by HIV/AIDS; one chain of factories in South Africa reserved employment for virgins only, a policy enforced with monthly tests. “Strictly monitoring and controlling women’s sexuality is being promoted as a solution to containing the growth of the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” wrote the South African anthropologist Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala. In many African societies, she added, “HIV/AIDS has meaning as a disease linked to the moral transgressions of modern women.” 5
    The kind of abstinence-only prevention policies promoted by the Bush administration were based on similar reasoning, as if the epidemic could be checked with an injection of spiritual fortitude. Under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR (which was justly praised for its role in providing lifesaving medicines to Africans), a full two thirds of American aid for the prevention of the sexual spread of HIV went to abstinence and faithfulness programs, often run by religious groups. American money influenced Uganda to abandon its successful, home-grown approach to curbing HIV in favor of one that fit the preconceptions of the religious right, with deadly results.
    Uganda’s initial response to AIDS encouraged people to limit their sexual partners, a policy called “zero grazing,” which was not the same as abstinence. Condoms played a role as well. “HIV infection rates fell most rapidly during the early 1990s, mainly because people had fewer casual sexual partners,” wrote journalist Helen Epstein in her groundbreaking book The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS . “However, since 1995, the proportion of men with multiple partners had increased, but condom use increased at the same time, and this must be why the HIV infection rate remained low.” 6
    American abstinence-only policies threatened these gains. “[B]illboards advertising condoms, for years a common sight throughout the country, were taken