Conservative fight against PEPFAR in Africa condemned as a ‘war on Black bodies’

Conservative groups allege that PEPFAR, an AIDS relief initiative, has become a tool for the Biden-Harris administration to push its “radical” agenda on abortion and LGBTQ rights overseas.

Despite its success in combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa over the past two decades, a conservative movement is threatening to upend the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, also known as PEPFAR, which experts warn could severely weaken progress made in saving lives and ending a decades-old global health epidemic.

PEPFAR, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003, has become a signature U.S. program in the African region that vulnerable nations have relied on for treatment, prevention and care. Since its enactment, it has been hailed as one of the greatest bipartisan achievements in modern history. 

To date, PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives and provided about $100 billion over the last 20 years across the globe, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa.

However, a coalition of conservatives is targeting PEPFAR and calling on members of Congress not to reauthorize the global health program for another five years. Conservative groups allege that PEPFAR has become a tool for the Biden-Harris administration to push its “radical” agenda on abortion and LGBTQ rights across the globe.

“The Biden Administration has misused the program as a well-funded vehicle to promote its domestic radical social agenda overseas,” said a report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that played an outsized role in the Trump administration. 

In a letter to Republican lawmakers, 31 conservative and anti-abortion groups claimed that PEPFAR funds are “used by nongovernmental organizations that promote abortions and push a radical gender ideology abroad.”

Travis Weber, an executive at the Family Research Council, an evangelical activist group, told Christianity Today that the approximately $5 billion is “being used as a massive slush fund for abortion and LGBT advocacy.”

Joseph Tolton, a human rights activist and organizer who has done considerable missionary work on the continent of Africa, dismissed conservative efforts not to reauthorize PEPFAR as a “war on Black bodies.”

“The American conservative religious right has its fingerprints all over the anti-democracy [and] anti-homosexuality bills across Africa,” said Tolton, who is the executive director of Interconnected Justice, a Pan-African organization aimed at connecting the Black diaspora globally.

He continued, “Whether we’re talking about the lives of women in Texas and in Mississippi, a third of the state of which is Black….or we are talking about the lives of those in Africa, the conservatives and the MAGA conservatives definitively have declared a global war.”

While conservative groups offered no evidence for their claim that the Biden-Harris administration is using PEPFAR to fund abortions or gender-affirming care, that has not stopped their crusade from gaining support in Congress. As reported by MSNBC, some Republicans support reauthorizing PEPFAR for only one year instead of five.

Doing so would undermine the program’s efforts to end the global HIV/AIDS health threat by 2030, says Katherine Bliss, a senior fellow on global health at the Center for Strategic International Studies.

“It will create considerable uncertainty within the implementing countries about the predictability of program funding levels and strategic approaches,” Bliss told theGrio. 

She continued: “For the partner organizations and the partner governments in the supported countries, it can make it more difficult for them to plan programs that, in some cases, may take several years to get underway.” 

Bliss said restructuring reauthorization could also lead to the loss of expertise as people may “look for other longer-term work commitments.” She added that, more broadly, it could “send a message that the United States is an unreliable partner.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is responsible for implementing PEPFAR, told theGrio in a statement that the program “does not fund abortions, consistent with longstanding legal restrictions on the use of foreign assistance funding related to abortion.”

The spokesperson added, “The same restrictions on using U.S. foreign assistance funds for abortion-related activities that predate PEPFAR have applied to PEPFAR since its inception and continue to guide its implementation.”

The agency said that in order for the Biden-Harris administration to achieve its goal of ending HIV/AIDS as a public health threat by 2030, President Joe Biden “supports a clean five-year PEPFAR reauthorization before it expires at the end of September.”

“The White House continues to engage Congress at senior levels to obtain this reauthorization,” the USAID spokesperson said.

Bliss said PEPFAR had been a “comprehensive and wide-ranging program” that has not only saved lives and spread awareness about HIV prevention in Africa but was also instrumental in aiding countries against COVID-19 during the pandemic.

“We saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that many countries that had been implementing HIV programs were able to really build on that in terms of being able to diagnose infections and maintain services for people with HIV while the pandemic was raging,” she told theGrio.

Tolton sees an irony in conservatives’ targeting of PEPFAR, considering it was spearheaded and signed into law by a Republican president. 

“Yet all of that and the lives of those with HIV and AIDS, whom this program benefits on a daily basis, will become a casualty,” he told theGrio.

Tolton described it as a “globalized culture war” in which “Republicans have decided…with an irrational sense of defiance that this is their moment, and it does not matter what the cost is.”

He added, “That is absolutely happening from Ron DeSantis’ education initiatives in Florida, to what we see happening with abortion around the country, to what we see happening around PEPFAR.”

Tolton urged the left to be more organized against the conservative movement because “MAGA Republicans…are counting on our being continuously fractured.”

“We need a movement on the left that somehow finds unity among those of us that are impacted by this global agenda,” he said. “We are undermining our ability to win what is now a global war against Blackness.”

Gerren Keith Gaynor is a White House Correspondent and the Managing Editor of Politics at theGrio. He is based in Washington, D.C.

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