Human rights and the Catholic condom ban)

The following criticism of Christianity comes from within. As a child, I learned the foundations of morality and personal responsibility from Christians (the Church of England and Presbyterian/Uniting Church in Melbourne, Australia). I am grateful to Christians and Christianity for a large part of my music education. As a musician and musicologist, I know how much of the wonderful music of the past was enabled and promoted by Christian churches.

Image this fictional scenario: A corona vaccine is found but a religious group forbids it, claiming that it is immoral. Death from corona is God’s will, they say. God doesn’t do things without a reason. We have no right to intervene. Besides, it is more reliable to wash your hands, keep your distance, and wear a mask. This “vaccine ban” indirectly causes thousands of deaths.

That’s more or less what happened with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, except the consequences were much worse. Not thousands, but millions died unnecessarily. The Catholic church had banned the most reliable way to stop AIDS transmission, the condom, in the 1960s. In the 1980s, as the AIDS pandemic gathered speed, it was clear the ban should urgently be lifted, and innumerable experts in medicine and international development called for just that. But even when it became clear the ban would indirectly cause millions of deaths, the church stuck to its guns. A series of Popes stubbornly refused to solve the church's most serious problem.

If not for the Catholic condom ban, many (10%? see postscript below) of the 30 to 40 million people who died of AIDS would never have contracted the disease. In terms of the likely death toll, and if we regard every human life as equally important ("equally sacred", as the church might say), the Catholic condom ban may be the worst human rights atrocity of the late 20th century.

The mega-deadly consequences of the Catholic condom ban have become one of history's greatest taboos. We are talking about an even bigger scandal than Catholic sexual abuse and pedophilia. This is not genocide, because no-one ever intended to kill anyone. But the case is legally similar to gross negligence. From Wikipedia:

In the U.K., a conviction for gross negligence manslaughter requires that the prosecutor prove the existence of a duty of care, breach of that duty by the defendant resulting in death, and a risk of death that would be obvious to a reasonable prudent person in the position of the defendant.

The case is also related to crimes against humanity, given that the perpetrators were well informed about the mega-fatal consequences but proceeded anyway. From that perspective, the case should be considered by the International Criminal Court -- even if the crime was strictly not "purposely committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian or an identifiable part of a civilian population", to quote the Wikipedia definition of crimes against humanity (in August 2020).

The church argues that the best way to avoid AIDS is to avoid sex except within marriage. Fidelity is certainly a good strategy for preventing AIDS, with or without condoms. But that raises some big questions. Why have thousands of "celibate" priests failed to avoid sex? And why is the church so obsessed with a topic that Jesus never mentioned? That, of course, is an old argument, dating to the reformation.

The Wikipedia page on the Catholic church and AIDS disguises the problem by focusing on the positive contribution of the church to AIDS treatment. I have tried in the past to remind fellow Wikipedians of the arguments presented here and in particular that prevention is better than cure, but it was not easy to negotiate with pious Catholics. Jesus would have been horrified. Perhaps others will have more luck by inserting links to published literature.

Astonishingly, hardly anyone seems to care about this issue. Probably no-one will comment on the present text, no matter how I present it. It is not often that one finds an accurate and honest statement on this topic by someone who actually cares about human rights and has the courage to present something close to the truth.

How might we explain the church's failure to address one of the biggest human rights violations of our time? One possibility is that almost everyone is one or more of the following five things: racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted (by which I mean blindly devoted to Christianity and intolerant of anything else), or afraid. Implicit stereotypes are a well-known and well-understood phenomenon in psychology. Many AIDS victims were gay (at least at the start of the epidemic), black (the epidemic started in Africa, and the church pushed the condom ban harder in Africa), or female (many women are forced by poverty into prostitution). Regarding "bigotry": however you look at the church's standard arguments on this topic, they are closer to superstition than common sense, and they contradict expert opinion in both medicine and international development. But people still accept them! Regarding fear, are we still afraid of suffering the fate of Galileo? Surely freedom of speech has never been greater than it is today in Western countries -- in particular, Western Europe?

Be that as it may: Anyone, religious or not, who admires and aspires to the moral courage of Jesus, as so powerfully portrayed in the gospels — especially when he directly criticized religious authority (woes of the Pharisees) — should be speaking out against the Catholic condom ban. The right to life is the most important human right. Lest we forget.

Abortion

The Catholic church argues that all human life is sacred, such that only God can terminate it. Moreover, life begins from the moment of conception and ends with death. Contraception is intrinsically evil because it prevents new human beings from coming into existence and renders the "marital act" intentionally unfruitful.

These ideas are problematic in three distinct ways:

Theologically, these ideas have little to do with anything mentioned in the gospels. Christianity should be about Christ.

Scientifically, concepts of life and death are not clearly defined. In biology, "life" distinguishes organisms from inorganic substances and dead objects. Defined in that way, life starts before human conception and ends after human death. In human culture, human death has different meanings for different people. For some, it is the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions. For others, it is brain death, which typically happens later. It could also be the end of consciousness -- not necessarily the same as brain death. It could be the loss of the ability/potential to become conscious again. The term "social death" is also relevant. When we say that a person is alive, we often mean they are conscious or capable of becoming so. In empirical studies in developmental psychology, consciousness develops gradually during the first few prenatal years. The fetus is not conscious in that sense.

Ethically, women and men have equal rights. Women are not reproduction machines -- just as men are not military machines.

Abortion is indeed a big problem. Most people on both sides of the debate (pro-life versus pro-choice) would like to see fewer abortions. The difference is that pro-lifers want to legally stop all abortions, whereas pro-choicers want to give women the right to make decisions about their own bodies, especially when the fetus is not old enough to survive a premature birth.

Approximately 73 million induced abortions occur worldwide each year. That's more than the total number of (other) human deaths (60 million per year). It is also half the number of all babies born per year (132...140 million). For every two babies born, there is an induced abortion! The global abortion rate also corresponds to around 61% of all unintended pregnancies and 29% of all pregnancies.

If the Catholic church was truly opposed to abortion, and if it truly believed in the sanctity of all human life, it would be trying to reduce the abortion rate as far as possible and in the most effective and ethically acceptable way. In other words, it would be promoting contraceptives.

Postscript
On 30 April 2025 I asked ChatGPT the following question:

How many AIDS deaths would have been prevented if the Catholic church had withdrawn its condom ban when the AIDS epidemic started in the early 1980s?

And here’s the answer:

Estimating how many AIDS deaths might have been prevented if the Catholic Church had lifted its condom ban in the early 1980s involves a counterfactual analysis—one that must consider behavioral, epidemiological, and sociopolitical factors. While it is difficult to pinpoint a precise number, we can outline a reasoned estimate based on available data and assumptions.
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1. Context and Influence of the Catholic Church
• The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception, including condoms, was (and remains) influential in heavily Catholic regions, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Latin America, and the Philippines.
• Church-run institutions and leaders often publicly discouraged condom use, even amid escalating HIV infections.
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2. Scope of the AIDS Epidemic
• UNAIDS estimates: Over 40 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the beginning of the epidemic.
• Sub-Saharan Africa has accounted for about two-thirds of global AIDS deaths, many in heavily Catholic countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Mozambique.
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3. Condom Effectiveness and Hypothetical Uptake
• Consistent condom use reduces heterosexual HIV transmission risk by 80–95%.
• Even partial adoption—say, a 20–30% increase in condom use due to Church endorsement—could have led to significant reductions in transmission rates.
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4. Estimates from Modeling Studies
A 2013 study published in BMJ Open [Stover et al.] suggested that condom promotion programs in Africa averted millions of infections. No study isolates the impact of Catholic doctrine, but we can roughly infer:
• Suppose 10–20% of AIDS deaths in affected Catholic populations could have been prevented by increased condom use.
• If we assume conservatively that 15 million of the 40 million global deaths occurred in regions where Church influence likely played a role, and that 15% of those could have been prevented, that implies:
~2.25 million AIDS deaths could have been prevented
(Estimate range: 1.5 to 3 million depending on model inputs)
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Conclusion
Roughly 1.5 to 3 million deaths might have been preventable if the Catholic Church had endorsed condom use early in the AIDS epidemic. This estimate is conservative and based on population exposure, Church influence, and known condom effectiveness. The real number could be higher depending on the magnitude of behavioral change.