Back in the early 1970s, when condoms were considered a miserable, highly-fallable WWII-era excuse for birth control, you had roughly two options for buying them if you were underage: Pharmacies which, back then, were almost always owned and operated by respectable middle-class citizens who usually lived in the neighborhoods their pharmacies served and often knew your parents, or truck-stop bathrooms on the edge of town.

Both sold the same kind of condoms — usually Trojan or Ramses — although the truck stops often had a separate machine that sold novelty condoms called “French ticklers” that, as far as I know, nobody in their right mind bought.

And back then, still not so long after the Griswold vs. Connecticut decision that finally legalized contraception, all condom dispensers, and many condoms, had a sticker or badge that said, in all capital letters, “FOR PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY.”

Fast forward to the 1980s and the advent of the first really incurable sexually transmitted diseases — herpes and HIV — and condoms got a new lease on life. The failure rate wasn’t any better (it’s still not much better) but as a barrier method condoms prevent disease transmission far better than no condom at all. (And since many STDs like syphilis, herpes, and — in some cases — HIV are transmitted via tissue-to-tissue contact as well as fluid exchange, even a broken condom offers more of a barrier than no condom at all.)

I bring this up because, fast forwarding again to the 2000’s…

The Vatican is considering whether to condone condoms as AIDS prevention. The church opposes condoms as contraception and thinks promoting them to stop AIDS is counterproductive because it encourages promiscuity. But a leading moderate cardinal says the church should allow condoms within marriage when one spouse has HIV, and the pope has asked his health department to consider whether this might be acceptable as a lesser evil.

Read it here, though since I’m not sure how long the link will last I’ve reproduced the entry in its entirety.

This is actually very good news. Contrary to our local experience, in much of the world HIV infection is very effectively transmitted through heterosexual vaginal intercourse — it’s the main way women contract it (and, by proxy, the way their children contract it.) If the cardinals decide to permit condom use that will directly remove a major obstacle to accessability for millions of people world-wide and may also indirectly benefit millions more by undercutting opposition to condom distribution by protestant and non-sectarian advocates of abstinence.

I’m pretty confident that any decision will have absolutely no bearing on the church’s opposition to contraception but with many, many millions of lives at stake I’ll take it.

It’s also worth pointing out that to the extent that condoms can be made available, and to the extent that there can be an official “for prevention of disease only” cover story, even if it’s supposedly only for married heterosexuals, then they will be more readily available for other users and for other purposes.

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More good news is on the horizon on the HIV-prevention front by the way

... if we could spur the pharmaceutical companies or the NIH to put a bit of money into the anti-HIV microbicides currently nearing breakthrough status, we’d save a lot of lives. As Kate Steadman points out, the primary driver of HIV infection in the third-world are patriarchal sexual arrangements where a lone male, with his many wives, mistresses, and prostitutes, can contract HIV from one source and spread it far and wide.

Sadly, condom use is taboo under the best of circumstances and, thanks to funding and support from the Christian Right, officially discouraged in many countries (like Uganda). An anti-HIV microbicide would give women a discreet way to protect themselves, one whose application and use they could largely control.

From Ezra Klein at TAPPED

In his post Ezra expresses pessimism about U.S. support for further development of distribution of this class of microbicide but it sounds like the FDA has fast-tracked review of at least one such product.