Obama to Remove
Abstinence Requirement for HIV Funding

President-elect Barack Obama plans to overhaul the Bush administration's international family planning and AIDS prevention funding policy, which excludes abortion and strictly supports abstinence-only education.

The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, enacted by President George Bush, is a $45 billion program that distributes drugs and offers prevention and relief to 3 million people in poor countries around the world. The program requires that abstinence and monogamy be stressed more than condom use, which many believe result in even higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, Susan Wood, Obama's cochair for women's health advisement, told Bloomberg News.

"We have been going in the wrong direction, and we need to turn it around and be promoting prevention and family planning services and strengthening public health," she said in the article.

On his first day in office in January 2001, Bush reinstated a policy barring the United State from funding family planning for organizations involved with abortion or comprehensive sex education.

Wood resigned as an Food and Drug Administration regulator for women's health in 2005 in protest of the agency's delay in clearing over-the-counter sales of the "morning-after pill" for two years. (Michelle Garcia, The Advocate)