2005-2006 Regular Session First House HR 5674

Summary: PATHWAY will ensure that US global HIV/AIDS programs better address the factors that put women and girls’ at increasing risk for HIV/AIDS infection. The bill would require the President to develop and adopt a comprehensive HIV prevention approach to address the real-life circumstances that create gender disparities in the rate of HIV/AIDS infection. Elements of the prevention strategy include increasing access to female condoms; confronting gender-based violence, rape, sexual coercion, cross generational sex and child marriage; promoting positive male behavior and attitudes toward women and girls; supporting educational and economic opportunities, and property rights to further promote autonomy; and expanding access to the health services that women typically use, including reproductive health programs.

In addition, PATHWAY would remove current earmarks that require at least 33 percent of US prevention funding to be spent solely on abstinence-until-marriage programs. This arbitrary funding restriction undermines comprehensive HIV prevention programs, and limits the ability of country programs to respond to local health.

What You Need to Know: Women make up almost half of the people living with HIV/AIDS and the percentage is even higher in sub-Saharan Africa where 57 percent of adults with HIV are women. Young women aged 15 to 24 are more than three times as likely to be infected with HIV than are young men. Current efforts are failing women and girls, because they do not address the real-life circumstances that put women and girls at risk. The ABC (Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms) model has proven insufficient and unable to address life’s realities: girls are often abstinent until marriage, they typically are monogamous, and often have little power to ask their partner to use a condom and lack access to female condoms. PATHWAY will help restructure US global HIV prevention efforts to confront a broader set of issues to more effectively slow the pandemic.

The limitations created by the arbitrary earmark requiring 33 percent of all prevention funds to be for abstinence-only-until marriage programs is limiting the success of HIV prevention efforts. A 2006 government analysis concluded that the earmark interferes with the ability of US supported programs to develop interventions that respond to local needs. In addition, the analysis found that the earmark had led to reduced efforts to prevention mother-to-child transmission of HIV and blood safety efforts.

Primary Sponsor(s): Barbara Lee (D-CA)

Introduction Date: June 22, 2006

Last Major Action: 6/22/2006: Referred to the House Committee on International Relations.