Contraception and Aids

I wonder whether I could add my tuppenny's worth to the debate on condoms between Jacqueline Calleja and Andrè Xuereb?

The British guru of family planning, John Guillebaud, quotes the failure rate of condoms as 2-15 per 100 women years (Contraception Today 2002).

It is ludicrous to blame the Catholic Church for the significant increase in the prevalence of HIV infection throughout the developing as well as the developed world. In Africa, longstanding cultural behaviour is responsible; promiscuity has been a way of life there for a very long time.

In the developed world, the availability of contraception and the gradual loss of stigmatisation of pre-marital as well as extra-marital sex has resulted in an explosion in the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections of all types; indeed, it is quite routine nowadays for teenagers to admit during medical consultations in UK to having had multiple sexual partners by the age of 19.

The rate of infection is due to teenage thinking and practice; they have an innate sense of virtual immortality and believe ''it will never happen to us''. Child sex education has failed miserably to stem the burgeoning tide of unwanted pregnancies and infections for this very reason.

The fact that almost 200,000 abortions are carried out annually in UK (only 4,000 of which are acknowledged to be for genuine medical reasons) is a social scandal which I am sure will be condemned in the future.

Finally, to quote Dr Guillebaud once more, it is right to sell monogamy on medical grounds; promotion of condom use in addition to other contraceptive methods should occur where there is a high risk of infection and there is acceptance that abstinence is simply not going to happen, however obviously sensible the latter course of action may be!