WASHINGTON (ABP) — A bill that would more than triple the amount of money the United States spends combating the AIDS pandemic got a boost Feb. 27 with a compromise over abstinence-focused prevention efforts and abortion.
House leaders and White House officials agreed on language that will send the five-year renewal of the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, to that chamber's floor for a vote.
Pro-choice lawmakers agreed to remove provisions from earlier drafts of the bill that would have allowed it to fund the anti-AIDS efforts of family-planning groups that also provide abortions. White House officials agreed to loosen the program's requirement that a large portion of the funds be spent on abstinence-focused efforts at stopping the disease's spread.
“While not perfect, this bill continues the principles of the bipartisan PEPFAR program passed five years ago,” said Tony Perkins, of the conservative Family Research Council, in a press release applauding the compromise. His group had objected to earlier versions of the bill.
“Twenty million innocent men, women and children, we must remember, have perished from HIV/AIDS — 20 million,” said Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the acting chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, just before the panel voted to approve the bill. “Forty million around the globe are HIV-positive. Each and every day, another 6,000 people become infected with HIV. We have a moral imperative to act, and act decisively.”
The bill allocates $50 billion over the next five years to anti-AIDS programs around the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where the disease is rampant.
The original PEPFAR bill, passed in 2003, authorized $15 billion over five years. It is widely regarded as President Bush's most broadly popular and successful foreign-policy initiative.
The renewal bill was named for the late Tom Lantos and Henry Hyde. Both men — Lantos a Democrat and Hyde a Republican — were former chairmen of the committee, and both died in the past year. Lantos and Hyde shepherded the original PEPFAR bill through Congress.
The bill is the “Tom Lantos and Henry J. Hyde United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Reauthorization Act,” H.R. 5501.