From last May’s much-debated placement of condom boxes in freshman dorms to the recent opening of the Women’s Center, reproductive rights and women’s issues have always been a heated topic of discussion on the Harvard campus.

Pitching in on the debate, a panel of speakers at the Harvard Law School (HLS) discussed the effects of U.S. abstinence-only policies. The event, entitled “Sex, Lies, and Silence,” offered a scathing critique of both abstinence-only education and the Bush administration’s funding and ideological support of such programs.

“Abstinence-only sets the clock back on women’s rights,” said panelist Julie F. Kay, a staff attorney at Legal Momentum, a New York-based women’s rights advocacy group.

Speaking to a packed lecture hall, Kay said abstinence-only programs are designed with a “real intent to make girls fearful of sex.” She cited “Free Teens,” a New-Jersey based program that states “Sex may make you feel good, but it can kill you or make you sterile.”

These programs also perpetuate gender stereotypes which make girls believe that they “are naturally chaste, and boys are the ones who’ve got to have it,” Kay said.

In order to receive federal funding as an “abstinence-only” program, groups must promote hetero-sexual marriage and define abstinence as “a voluntary choice not to engage in sexual activity or any type of sexual stimulation between two persons,” explained panelist William Smith, a vice president at a Washington D.C. advocacy group.

“Apparently three or four is fine,” he joked.

Smith went on to say that the broad and vague use of the term “sexual stimulation” is also problematic.

“If you look into someone’s eyes and you have a [physical] response, apparently you’ve just become non-abstinent,” Smith said.

All panelists agreed that abstinence-only curricula contain scientifically inaccurate data. Groups commonly distribute distorted statistics to promote abstinence, Kay said.

One such federally funded abstinence-only sexual education program teaches that condoms fail 14 percent of the time, contrasted to the three percent accepted by the wider medical community and cited by medical journals, according to Kay.

The same program’s pamphlet states that HIV/AIDS can be contracted through tears, sweat, and saliva.

“The [current] Administration actively promotes these kinds of programs without any sort of evidence base,” said Jodi Johnson, the executive director and founder of the Maryland-based Center for Health and Gender Equity.

“This issue is cash money for the Bush Administration and their religious base,” Smith contended. “They’ve stretched beyond the bounds of not just reality, but credibility.”

Smith said he is optimistic the government will respond to rights groups, but that “this is a political problem that requires in part a political solution—so vote, vote, vote!”

The panel was co-sponsored by the HLS Human Rights Program, Legal Momentum, and the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International Health and Human Rights.

—Staff writer Ariadne C. Medler can be reached at amedler@fas.harvard.edu.