Irony in Action
Jenna Bush, daughter of President George Bush, has released a book chronicling the life of a teenage orphan in Latin America. The young girl is an AIDS orphan and she herself has AIDS. She’s currently a single teen mother. You can read about Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope on Amazon or on any number of news outlets. Jenna plans on donating her $300,000 book advance and other book-related profits to UNICEF, where she was volunteering when she met “Ana.”
None of the interviews I’ve read of Jenna have asked the truly hard questions one would expect. Granted, the girl is not actually in politics but the irony of her effects to raise awareness about AIDS while her father works to impede the fight against AIDS should be great news fodder.
In an interview in Glamour magazine (Nov. 2007, p. 296), the interviewer asked Jenna a “tough” question based on
…whether the book’s message about the importance of condoms conflicts with the abstinence-only policy promoted by her father’s administration. Will there be a dust-up on the issue?
JENNA: I don’t think so. The book’s message is the exact same thing my mother said when she was in Africa recently—A, B, C: abstinence, be faithful and condom usage. Abstinence is important; if you don’t want any chance of getting a disease, then don’t have sex. But if you’re HIV positive and you have sex, you must always use a condom. You can’t talk about being a teenage mother and stopping the spread of AIDS without talking about condoms.
She conveniently dodges the whole issue of having sex outside of marriage. In areas where AIDS is an epidemic, rates of married women with AIDS is rising (they don’t have the social power to demand their husbands use condoms or refrain from sex). Sex work is often a means of survival and condomless sex work brings the most money (this is due to a lack of education for both men and women, as well as a lack of rights for women). And what about the numbers of women who gets AIDS from rape during warfare? The ABC plan doesn’t even exist in the same universe.
To review, here’s a sampling of what Bush has done for the fight against AIDS (not to mention his feelings on young, unwed mothers):
- General critique of Bush’s AIDS policies
- Bush’s terrible effect on family-planning clinics the world over (2001)
- Randal Tobias is appointed as head of U.S. Global AIDS to lead implementation of the Emergency Plan (2003 – we already know how well this works out)
- Bush helping the spread of AIDS and another perspective (2003)
- The effects of his domestic AIDS policy (2004)
- Details of the ABC plan (2005)
- The ABC program dissected (2006)
- How well ABC actually works (2007)
- A new $30 billion initiative to fight AIDS and other diseases (2007)
- How the new PEPFAR funding is to be distributed and the holes in the plan (2007)
While I hope that this book sells a lot of copies because funds will go to UNICEF, I have very mixed feelings about the book’s author and I certainly do not agree with her thoughts on fighting AIDS. More practical action – grounded in reality – is needed. Not every AIDS victim is going to be as “inspiring” and optimistic as Ana, nor be so lucky to have a famous biographer.
