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From: Rob.Bates@p1.f381.n634.z3.fidonet.org (Rob Bates)
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Subject: Australian AIDS News
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Date: 27 Sep 89 19:47:17 GMT
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HARD LINES AT AUSTRALIAN BIOETHICS CONFERENCE

by Adam Carr

(Reproduced with permission from Melbourne Star Observer #105, 22 September  
1989 (C) MSO and OZ Media Ltd).

A national conference on AIDS and Bioethics was held in Adelaide on September  
5-7.  Although attendance was greatly reduced by the airlines dispute, about  
150 people managed to get there.  They heard a lively and challenging  
discussion of some of the ethical issues surrounding AIDS from local and  
overseas speakers.

The tone of the conference was generally conservative, although a wide range of  
points of view was represented in the audience. People with HIV or AIDS were  
notably absent from both the speakers' platform and the audience, and people  
actually involved in the fight against AIDS were in the minority. Many  
attendees were clergy or people from Christian organizations, including many  
from the Catholic health and welfare systems.

Two international speakers gave keynote papers. Professor Charles Vella, a  
Maltese-born Catholic priest and director of a large AIDS hospital in Milano,  
Italy, spoke eloquently on the duty of healthcare workers to AIDS patients, and  
also on the duty of Christians to offer compassion and care to all people with  
AIDS, regardless of their opinions on the lifestyles or practices that may have  
led to infection. Vella emerged as the main champion of "practical ethics" at  
the conference.

Dr David Pence, an American doctor and lecturer, gave a more controversial  
paper, focussing on what he saw as the ethical obligations of governments and  
health professonals to ignore political objections and to apply rigorous public  
health measures, such as contact tracing and isolation, to stopping the spread  
of HIV. Pence is an articulate and in many ways attractive speaker, but most in  
the audience found his views hard to accept in full. He believes, for example,  
that homosexuality and prostitution should be criminalized.

The other major address was from Hiram Caton, Professor of Politics at Griffith  
University, Brisbane. Caton, in a highly polemical paper, claimed that AIDS  
education in Australia had failed through its failure to address ethical  
questions and its reliance, as he saw it, on advertising techniques.  He also  
strongly opposed school-based AIDS education that appeared to condone sexual  
activity and drug use by school students. Many (including Professor Vella) felt  
that the credibility of Caton's paper was weakened by its heavily sarcastic  
tone and its obviously political intent.

The two days of the conference was mostly taken up with debating these issues  
in a workshop format. I found these debates very stimulating, since I was  
forced to go back to basics and to defend the record (and indeed the existence)  
of the gay community and of the AIDS Councils from fundamental principles. It  
is a long time since I have had to debate the proposition that homosexuality is  
a "moral evil". These debates were important, because many uncommitted people  
were there, and were being exposed to some of these issues for the first time.  
Some of these people will soon be making decisions that may effect the health-  
care of people with AIDS.

The conference cannot simply be written off as a right-wing wank, as I think  
some people have been tempted to do. Despite his less- than-friendly views on  
homosexuality, Dr Pence made some telling points about the medical and  
governmental response to AIDS, and raised issues that AIDS Councils are  
certainly going to have to address more directly in the future than we have  
done so far.

Despite the horrors of flying to Adelaide in a small metal tube with  
propellers, and the indignity of having to come home by bus, I think the  
conference was important, and it will probably be the first shot in a debate  
that will become more intense as the epidemic progresses.

(Adam Carr is Vice-President of the Victorian AIDS Council. His views as  
expressed in the Star Observer are personal ones.)

--  
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