This article originally appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of Conscience.

Important Roman Catholic leaders such as the late Cardinal John O’Connor and Bishop James McHugh, who was a special advisor to the Holy See Mission at the United Nations, have frequently claimed that condoms are not effective in preventing AIDS. In addition, anti-family planning organizations such as the American Life League and Human Life International have aggressively questioned the efficacy of condoms. They argue that condoms should not be promoted as a way to fight AIDS because the virus that causes AIDS is small enough to pass through latex condoms, or that condoms have an unacceptably high “failure rate” (the frequency which condoms break or slip off), or that condoms are not reliable because they don’t prevent all sexually transmitted diseases.

Such claims that condoms should not play an important role in halting the spread of HIV are unfounded, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and leading AIDS researchers. Condoms opponents have seized on the fact that condoms are not 100% perfect in preventing AIDS to further their arguments that abstinence and sex within marriage are the only ways to prevent AIDS.

Condoms, like all contraceptives, are not 100% foolproof. Most condom failure is due to human factors such as the failure to use condoms consistently or incorrect use of the prophylactic.¹ Many of these problems can be corrected through safe sex education, which opponents of condoms also oppose. Poorly manufactured condoms, which are sometimes found in the developing world, or those stored at excessive heats for long periods of time, can also fail. Non-latex condoms, such as those made of sheepskin, are not adequate protect against AIDS because HIV can pass through the larger pores of these condoms.

Claims that latex condoms allow HIV to pass through are unfounded. The pores of latex condoms are too small to allow HIV to pass through. Condoms have been shown to be effective barriers not only to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but also to herpes simplex, CMV, hepatitis B, chlamydia and gonorrhea.²

While condoms are not foolproof, they are highly effective in preventing HIV infection. According to the CDC, studies examining sexually active people at high risk for contracting HIV have found that “even with repeated sexual contact, 98-100% of those people who used latex condoms correctly and consistently did not become infected.³ The CDC recently issued prevention guidelines for state health departments that state “correct and consistent use of latex condoms can reduce the risk of sexually transmitted infections.⁴ On August 16, 2001, the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS and the World Health Organization issued a statement that said that condoms were “the best defense” in preventing sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS.⁵

In the US, some conservative political forces have hijacked the condom issue to advance their own political agenda—namely, the idea that sexual abstinence before marriage and sex within marriage are the only forms of sexual expression that should be sanctioned by society. The debate became public this summer when the US National Institutes of Health released a long-awaited report on the effectiveness of condoms. While confirming that condoms are effective in preventing HIV and gonorrhea, the report said that there is less evidence available that condoms effectively protect against other non-fatal STDs such as human papillomavirus, chlamydia, syphilis, and genital herpes.⁶ Despite the report’s affirmation of the effectiveness of condoms in preventing AIDS, conservatives immediately seized on the report to charge that public health officials had been falsely proclaiming the effectiveness of condoms and safe sex programs.

Two small, conservative physicians’ organizations, the Catholic Medical Association and the Physicians Consortium, and former Rep. Tom Coburn (R-OK), who requested the report when he was in Congress, called on CDC head Dr. Jeffrey Koplan to resign. They charged the CDC with promoting public health campaigns that “withhold from the American people the truth of condom ineffectiveness,” a charge that outraged public health experts and advocates, who fear the negative publicity could damage years of headway made in safe sex education.⁷ Coburn, a physician, worked hard in his last few years in Congress to promote abstinence-only sexuality education by exploiting fears that condoms may not be completely effective in preventing human papillomavirus, which has been implicated in the development of a small number of some kinds of cervical cancer, mainly because the virus may spread to areas not covered by a condom.⁸

An analysis of the NIH report by Willard Cates, president of Family Health International, notes that the report did not say that condoms do not work against STDs other than HIV, only that there is less data because these diseases have not been as extensively studied. Furthermore, “HIV is less easily transmitted and gonorrhea is more easily transmitted during unprotected coitus; thus the condom is more forgiving of imperfect use when it comes to HIV protection.” Cates concludes: “Deliberate attempts to characterize the evidence as demonstrating the ‘ineffectiveness of condoms’ constitute a misunderstanding of what the report states. Moreover, such misrepresentation can undermine the public’s confidence in condoms, thereby leading to nonuse and to further spread of STIs and HIV.”⁹