Reagan Asks Abstinence in Remarks About AIDS

President Reagan, gingerly entering the national AIDS debate, Wednesday endorsed AIDS sex education in the schools but insisted that such programs should remain under local control and teach sexual abstinence and fidelity.

“Let’s be honest with ourselves: AIDS information cannot be what some call ‘value neutral,’ ” said the President, who rarely has spoken about the disease in public. “After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons?”

Reagan, speaking before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a 200-year-old organization made up of 2,100 elected fellows, outlined his Administration’s efforts in fighting the scourge, citing “unprecedented progress against a major virus” in the six years of the deadly epidemic.

“It took 40 years of study to learn as much about polio,” the President said. “It took 19 years to develop a vaccine against hepatitis B. But then, our battle against AIDS has been like an emergency room operation: We’ve thrown everything we have into it.”

However, he said, “all the vaccines and medications in the world won’t change one basic truth: that prevention is better than cure, and that’s particularly true of AIDS, for which right now there is no cure.

“This is where education comes in,” Reagan added. “The federal role must be to give educators accurate information about the disease. How that information is used must be up to schools and parents, not government.”

It was a striking departure for the President, who has been criticized for his apparent reluctance to discuss AIDS publicly. Tuesday, he and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac announced that feuding American and French AIDS researchers had agreed to share patent rights for AIDS antibodies blood screening tests.

Before that, his last public mention was in February, 1986, when he announced that he had asked Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to write a report to the public on the deadly disease. The previous fall, he briefly responded to several questions about AIDS at a televised news conference.

Federal health officials attributed the President’s willingness to discuss AIDS publicly Wednesday to a “changed climate,” citing increasing concern about heterosexual transmission and the recent national debate about television advertising of condoms.

“Obviously, some considerable political thought was given to it,” said one public health official, who requested anonymity. “The White House strategists decided there was a time to talk and a time not to talk. Now there’s something to talk about that’s politically acceptable.”

Sense No Resistance

White House officials, however, said that they “never sensed any resistance on Reagan’s part” to discuss AIDS in public. They noted that Reagan often prefers to allow other officials to represent Administration policy publicly on specific issues.

“When the decision was made to do this event, I pointed out that it would be impossible to speak to a group of doctors and not mention the major medical issue that’s on everyone’s minds,” said Gary Bauer, the President’s domestic policy adviser. “I think there’s a notion out there that there is a bunch of people in the White House saying: ‘Oh, my God, don’t let him talk about that’--but I don’t pick that up at all.”

In his speech and in remarks made here to reporters, Reagan indicated that he favored urging sexual abstinence and monogamous relationships to prevent the spread of AIDS.

“Should you just say no?” the President was asked as he left the White House, a reference to First Lady Nancy’s Reagan’s anti-drug campaign slogan.

“That’s a pretty good answer,” he replied.

Sides With Bennett

Reagan appeared to side with the views of Education Secretary William J. Bennett, who clashed earlier in the year with Surgeon General Koop and the Public Health Service over the tone and philosophy of AIDS sex education. Bennett had urged that AIDS sex education stress abstinence, adding that such programs should advocate heterosexual behavior.

Like Bennett, Koop has urged abstinence and monogamy but has also declared that realistic AIDS education programs must teach that the proper use of condoms will reduce sexual transmission of the AIDS virus. In addition, Koop said, such programs “should include information on both heterosexual and homosexual relationships.”

When asked about the dispute, Reagan told reporters that AIDS sex education “should be taught in connection with values, not simply taught as a physical, mechanical process.”

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health--and one of the most vocal critics of the President’s failure to discuss AIDS--said that Reagan “should have been speaking out on this and acting long before now.”

Defends Administration

Although his spending requests have been below Congress’ appropriations, the President defended his Administration’s efforts in fighting the epidemic, saying that “spending on AIDS has been one of the fastest-growing areas of the budget.”

He said the government this year would spend $416 million on AIDS research and education, as well as $766 million overall on AIDS-related matters. The latter figure, however, includes spending by Medicare and Medicaid, which the Administration is required to carry out. Next year, he said, the Administration will seek to increase total spending to $1 billion.

But a House health subcommittee official said that Reagan’s 1987 spending request was $213 million--about $200 million less than the amount eventually awarded by Congress--and his fiscal 1988 request of $533 million is about $900 million less than the amount recommended by Waxman.

In his speech, which dealt with health care in the United States, Reagan called on doctors to impose their own limits on health care costs, saying that his Administration would not seek “a mandatory cost containment system.”

In an apparent reference to medical malpractice suits, Reagan suggested that lawyers, like physicians, should swear to a Hippocratic Oath, “so that they will, as you swear to do, ‘abstain from every voluntary act of mischief.’ ”

James Gerstenzang reported from Philadelphia and Marlene Cimons from Washington.