Remarks: Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism - International Children's Issues and HIV/AIDS

REMARKS: RELIGIOUS ACTION CENTER OF REFORM JUDAISM - INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN'S ISSUES AND HIV/AIDS

Thank you, Rabbi Menitoff for that kind introduction. I am very honored to be here.

I would also like to thank Rabbi Saperstein and Mark Pelavin from the Religious Action Center for inviting me to speak today. I would like to recognize the fellow Ohioans who are here today, including Rabbi Edward Goldman of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and Rabbi Howard Ruben and wife Susan of Beachwood, Ohio. Thank you all for being here.

I appreciate the opportunity to come here today to talk about something I care passionately about -- child survival issues and the fight against global HIV/AIDS. Let me begin by saying, though, that I am not an expert on these issues. Those of us who are in United States Senate are, by definition, generalists. I am not a medical or a health expert, and I do not pretend to be one. Rather, what I try to do is to understand issues. And, the best way I can do that is based on my own experiences and getting out and learning the facts and trying to see how things actually happen.

With regard to today's child survival crises and global HIV/AIDS pandemic, we know the facts:

650 million children live in extreme poverty.

130 million children entered the 21st Century unable to read or write.

450 newborn children die every hour, mainly from preventable causes. And every four seconds, a child dies from starvation and related causes.

2,000 children younger than 15 day are infected with AIDS each day.

And, over 10 million children die each year, most from preventable causes and almost all in desperately poor countries.

Now, ten million children is the equivalent of roughly 55 fully loaded 747 airplanes crashing every day for a year. If that many airplanes were going down each day in this country, we would be up in arms! It would be all over the newspapers, and we would be seeing it all over CNN. Yet, because it's not happening here, we tolerate it, and we simply try not to think about it.

We have seemingly come to expect, and indeed, accept poverty, instability, and epidemic disease as a way of life in the developing world. And the real tragedy in all of it -- all of it -- is avoidable.

It may not come as a surprise to you that Congress has not focused enough on child survival and child development issues. There is a lack of knowledge on Capitol Hill -- a lack of knowing that simple, inexpensive interventions can save millions of children's lives. The reality is that we just aren't talking enough about it and consequently, we just aren't doing enough about it, either. The result? We end up tolerating the needless deaths of 10 million innocent children each year. Saving those lives has not been a priority. It has not been a priority for us in the United States Congress, and frankly, it has not been a priority for the other developed nations in the world.

Collectively, we have failed.

So, what is it going to take to get the world to act? Staggering as the statistics are, they don't always move us to act. What really informs us is the opportunity to see people and talk to people. My understanding of child survival and health systems and HIV/AIDS started to mature, frankly, with a chance trip that my wife Fran and I took to Haiti about a decade ago. Since that time, we have revisited that very troubled country 14 different times. We also have traveled to other nations where children are dying each day like Honduras, Guyana, Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

What I have learned on those trips is that we have a moral imperative to act. I truly believe that at the end of our life, we will be judged not only by what we did, but by what we failed to do. The sins of omission, as my friend Henry Hyde has said, are what will, at the last moment, weigh us down more than anything else, and are what we will be truly sorry for. We will be sorry for what we did not do -- the times when we stepped back, the times when we blinked, the times when we said "no" we just can't do that. And, I think when we look at the crisis of more than 10 million children dying -- unnecessarily -- every year, or we look at the crisis of poverty or young children just literally starving to death or the spread of HIV/AIDS, it's our failure to act that is really the gravest sin.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the United Nations released a report suggesting that "more than 80 million Africans may die from AIDS by 2025 and infections could soar to 90 million -- or more than 10 percent of the African continent's population -- if more is not done soon to fight the disease." UNAIDS also estimates that nearly $200 billion is needed to save 16 million people from death and 43 million people from becoming infected with HIV. The developing world has pledged nowhere near that amount.

Yet, we have the ability to act. We have the resources and medical science, thank heavens, has given us the ability to go out and change the world. We have the ability to go out and save millions of lives through things like HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention -- simple, inexpensive things like mother-to-child HIV transmission prevention drugs -- things that can cost less than $3.00 per mother, per birth. We can also save millions of lives through malaria control and nutritional feeding programs and clean water projects.

Americans, though, quite frankly have a short attention span. And what that means is that whatever the steps we take, the problems facing the developing world cannot be resolved through short-term, temporary, piecemeal assistance. Our funding simply cannot be administered in a single-dose. And, we must be sure our money is used to provide effective, life-saving interventions. We need to buy the medicines, purchase the vaccinations, and get the medical supplies needed to administer these interventions. We've got to move past the talk of action -- and TAKE action.

Let me conclude with one final thought. Author Jim Wallis once said that "it is the experience of touching the pain of others that is the key to change -- that compassion is a sign of transformation." I believe that to be the case. We have to put things on human terms. We have to describe what we have seen, and we have to do it in graphic terms. We have to make it real, and we have to make it understandable.

As I mentioned already, I have visited several countries ravaged by poverty and disease, including AIDS. I've seen the crisis in Guayana. And I've also witnessed its devastating effects in Africa and Haiti. My wife Fran and I have touched the pain of many others, as we held babies in our arms who were dying right in front of our faces of this dreaded disease. We've played with orphaned children, who lost their parents to AIDS. We've talked to parents who've watched all of their children -- one by one -- succumb to this deadly scourge.

But, in witnessing all of this despair, we've also seen that there is hope. On one of our visits to Haiti a couple of years ago, we met a little five year-old boy named Francois. He was lying on a concrete floor of an orphanage. He had tubes stuck in what was left of his tiny veins. He weighed no more than 15 pounds. He was within a day or two of dying of AIDS. You see, little Francois did not have the life-saving, anti-retroviral drugs available to him that he needed so desperately to survive.

Fran and I returned to that same orphanage in about ten months ago. We met another little boy. His name was David. Like Francois, David has AIDS. And, though six months prior to our visit, David, too, lay dying on that same concrete floor, a miracle had happened. Anti-retroviral drugs were made available to David at that orphanage. And, they brought him back to life. David is a happy, chubby, healthy little boy, who laughed and played and followed us all around that orphanage.

David is our hope. And, we can save millions more children just like David if we just get those drugs and those treatments to the people who need them most. We have an obligation to do something. You can't go to these AIDS-devastated countries without coming back needing to do something. We owe it to Francois and the thousands and thousands and thousands of children just like him who never got the chance to live.

Thank you.

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