Unintended Consequences
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
28 Jun 2009
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Nobody is opposed to good intentions, but even conscientious decisions can have unexpected and disastrous consequences.
Nobody planned the world-wide financial collapse which destroyed forty per cent of the world's wealth in six months. Remember the millennium bug when millions of dollars was spent to avoid computer collapse as we moved from the second to the third millennium?
Spreading deserts remain a major ecological challenge in Australia and aggressive land clearing for crops and pasture was making the situation worse. The great dust storms of the past are much less frequent now.
Is the Christian teaching on sexuality (and it is traditional Christian doctrine, not an un-scriptural Catholic invention) that extra marital sexual activity should be avoided and that husband and wife should be faithful exclusively to one another a prime example of a well intentioned doctrine with disastrous unintended consequences? Doesn't the Catholic opposition to the use of condoms compound the ill effects?
When Pope Benedict warned about the consequences of encouraging condom use in Africa about 4,000 largely hostile articles appeared world wide.
The accepted wisdom in the scientific community is that condoms lower the HIV infection rate and they do provide protection in eighty or even ninety per cent of the times when they are used.
But the statistics in Africa show that condoms do not lower the infection rate there, because they encourage people to take greater risks (behavioral disinhibition).
Therefore more and more African governments are endorsing policies which emphasise the centrality of responsible personal decision making and the health results are improving. Abstinence and fidelity, fewer sex partners make a difference.
What do the statistics show in the Western world? Certainly safe sex campaigns have brought welcome health gains in the battle against AIDS. But what else is happening and why is it happening?
Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Centre for Population and Development Studies has written that "in every country worldwide in which HIV has declined there have been increases in levels of faithfulness and usually abstinence as well".
Many people in the Western world resist this message. In New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has given away tens of millions of free condoms and the city has an HIV rate three times the U.SA. national average. Is it implausible to suggest that reckless behaviour might be increased by free condoms?
